He bought milky coffee in a Styrofoam cup from a lone vendor and smoked a cigarette and stamped his feet as the other passengers disembarked, the men puffy-eyed and hostile, the women with their hair in disarray, holding their hands up against the wind, looking defensive and unhappy. For Joe, though, there was a kind of peace in the moment. The point of transit was like the epicentre of two opposing forces, like the equilibrium found when an equal pull is exerted on a body from all directions, creating the moment of stillness that is free-fall. For Joe those were the moments of exquisite calm, a perfect present with no future and no past. He loved the waiting times, the empty times, the endless moments that came in-between the going and the gone.

A light rain, driven by the wind, came across the water, and Joe’s cigarette stub, extinguished, floated at his feet, hovering above the ground, and for a moment he stared at it, transfixed, as if observing an alien artefact, or a strange, unknown remnant of an ancient civilization. Then he laughed and the sound made the great open space around him seem warmer somehow, and he joined the rest of the passengers on the way to the waiting train. The cliffs of Dover, chalky and pale, were being left behind, their faces, many now, staring out across the sea. Joe stared back through the window; inside it was warm and the humidity fogged up the windows and he had to wipe the pane with his sleeve. He pressed his face to the glass, which was cool against his skin, and peered out. He wondered what the faces of Dover saw when they gazed out to sea. Across the channel the poppies grew, somewhere there beyond the water, in the French landscape he had so recently passed through; he pictured a field of poppies growing where, beneath, a field of humans had been sowed and reaped. The train gathered momentum, but for a long time Joe’s face remained glued to the glass, staring out, beyond the gentle English moon-lit landscape sprayed with silver rain, seeing, as if through a fine haze, endless red flowers blossoming across the silent world.

PART THREE

FUZZY-WUZZIES

the angel of Christian charity

——

There were tourists milling all around the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus and the sun was seeping through dirty grey clouds, putting a sheen of sweat on girls’ upper lips and on the men’s foreheads. Cars went round the circus like herds of primitive herbivores, and in the high façade above the Café Monico opposite Anteros, large wrought-iron signs were advertising Lipton, Wrigley’s and Delicious Coca Cola. A large clock gave out Guinness Time. Joe stood underneath the statue. The god of requited love and the avenger of love scorned was a boy with wings resembling those of the pigeons milling all around the circus. It stood, one leg raised in the air, on its plinth above the fountain, its bow held aloft, its eyes glazed. It was made of aluminium. It had been modelled on a sixteen-year-old Italian boy, Angelo Colarossi. The boy had since then grown old and died. Anteros remained youthful. A tour group went past Joe and stopped beside the fountain, and their guide, bald and sweating in the lightless humidity, said, as if continuing an earlier monologue, ‘And this is the famous Angel of Christian Charity, erected on this site in eighteen ninety two, moved again to this exact spot following the Second World War –’

‘I thought this was Eros,’ a man in the tour party said. He had a thick Dutch accent and corn-yellow hair. The guide smiled and wiped sweat off his brow. ‘A common inaccuracy, sir,’ he said. ‘Though indeed, originally, it was meant to be the brother of the God of Sensual Love –’

A double-decker bus went past, the people inside looking down through their windows on the milling crowds. Joe saw a young couple kissing on the steps of the fountain, quite unconcerned with the touring party or anyone else. The girl had long black hair and the boy’s was shorn and neither were much older than the angelic Angelo Colarossi at the time he had posed for the statue.

‘Ah, the Criterion!’ the guide said, with something like relief, turning away from the fountain. ‘Wonderful theatre. Built by Spiers and Pond on the site of the White Bear Inn – come, follow me, all together now! – and opened with W.S. Gilbert’s little-known Topsyturveydom – moving on, we have –’

Joe smiled as he lit his cigarette. The site of Piccadilly Circus, at least, did not appear to be a stranger to topsyturveydom. Amongst the tourists, the school kids who had mysteriously failed to make an appearance at school, the buskers, the pickpockets, the drug pushers, the gypsy women selling paper flowers, the young musicians with their second-hand guitars, the commuters coming and going from the tube station directly below – amongst all these, the world did indeed seem to be in a permanent state of topsy-turvy. He stood below the Angel of Christian Charity and waited, smelling sweat, car fumes, marijuana smoke, passing perfumes, frying onions, burning sausages, spilled beer, and finally the smoke of a cheap cigar as he saw the man waiting in the entrance of the theatre (the tour group having moved on). He went up to the man.

‘You Joe?’ the man said. Joe nodded. They shook hands. The man was bald and round. His eyes were deep-set and small. He wore a dirty-brown raincoat, and puffed on a thin brown cigar as he spoke. He noticed Joe’s look and said, ‘Hamlet.’

‘Hamlet?’

‘The cigar. Like to be or not to be, you know?’

‘Sure. Shakespeare.’

‘Right.’

‘So which is it?’ Joe said.

‘Which is what?’

‘To be, or not to be?’

‘Ah,’ the man said, and smiled, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. ‘That is the question, isn’t it.’

The man’s name was Mo and Joe had found him in the telephone guide that rested by the phone in his hotel. He was looking under Private Inquiry Agents. He had to admit Mo looked the part. He had a grubby, well-used look, like a paperback that had been carried in a backpack for a long length of time. And he looked unremarkable. None of the people passing them by gave them more than a cursory glance. They could have been two disembodied shadows, standing there outside the theatre, while humanity surged on all around them.

Joe stayed at the Regent Palace Hotel across the road. The building suited him. His room on the fifth floor was small and had no windows. The showers were at the end of a wide and empty corridor. An army could have gotten lost in the Regent Palace. As Joe walked down endless corridors he encountered no-one else, and the only sound as he passed was of his shoes against the floor, a rhythm resembling that of a beating heart, counting seconds and minutes and the passing of time. When he checked in, the concierge had told him, reminiscing, ‘You know, in the old days, if you wanted a girl for the night you used to ring the desk and ask for an extra pillow.’

‘And today?’ Joe asked. He paid in cash. The concierge shrugged and looked into his eyes and said, ‘You just ask for a girl. My name’s Simon. You need anything you call me.’

‘Thank you,’ Joe said. Then he had gone up in the elevator; he had not seen another hotel guest since.

Joe liked London. He liked its crowds, its constant movement, its hurried busyness. There was a different kind of being alone, of not being noticed, in London. It was a city where it was easy to disappear, to become a face in the crowd that no one would ever glance twice at.

‘You want we should go someplace we could talk that’s more comfortable?’ Mo said. Joe followed the man’s eyes to the large Guinness clock above the signs opposite. It was just past twelve o’clock. ‘Say, a pub?’

‘You got the information for me?’

The man tapped his temple. ‘Right here,’ he said.