Do Not Pass Go Page 35

  ‘Don’t think so,’ I said, looking in mirrors and between the silver columns for any periwigged footmen. ‘It’s all twenties now. What’s your place like?’

  Birna might be putting on a brave face, but she still had some work to do on the voice. ‘It’s not as bad as prison,’ she whispered reedily after an interval which suggested this had been a close call. ‘I think it might be a halfway house.’

  A halfway house, I thought but didn’t say, would be one on Vine Street or Strand. There was nothing halfway about the Old Kent Road. Whereas I, of course, had gone all the way. ‘What about the foreign students?’

  ‘There aren’t any. No one under forty. Actually, hardly anyone over forty. I’ve seen a man with a backpack full of the Big Issue and an old lady with . . . with a hump.’

  A lunatic guffaw very nearly burst free from my throat at this point, but I swallowed it down with a gulp of Darjeeling and talked on. ‘So you’re in your room?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘I don’t think I want to talk about it.’ There was a small noise which I hoped wasn’t a sniff. ‘How about yours?’

  ‘I don’t think you want to hear about it.’ I should have said ‘them’. ‘Listen, I’d better go. My tea’s here.’

  ‘Yes, I understand. The little éclairs are good.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not having any of that stuff. Just a cup of tea.’

  ‘I don’t think you should do that. Look at the menu.’

  And indeed there was only the one option, and that involved not just tea but access to a broad selection of pastries and sandwiches. With or without a pianist tinkling out ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’, and preferably without the over-tanned blazer-wearer loudly giving some poor girl the full Leslie Philips at a table behind me, that £26 bill seemed not just a bit steep but a genuine threat to the new world order. Advancing straight from the Old Kent Road to Mayfair in half an hour was a huge mistake: I’d gone down with the financial equivalent of the bends. Twenty-six pounds – that was only four quid less than bed and board at the Driscoll House. On the other hand, by cramming every last cake, sarnie and – what the heck – asteroidally misshapen sugar lump into my gaping maw, I rendered the subsequent ingestion of still more extravagant evening victuals not just unnecessary but medically impossible.

  Slumped bloatedly behind the fantastically overbearing chairman-of-the-board desk in my double-sofa sitting room, I wearily embarked upon the arduous task of re-collating my abused maps and photocopies into some semblance of order. There was the lunatic façade of Edgington’s the year before it went down; here – flatten, tauten, rip, blaspheme – was sheet V5 of my Ordnance Survey collection, cluttered with the potato markets, ‘coal shoots’ and milk sheds of King’s Cross in 1914. It all took some time, and when it was done I tugged out my old board and centred it in the gilt-embossed acreage before me. If I wasn’t sick of the sight of it now, I thought, I never will be, and I can’t have been because laid out across leather and burnished wood, that palette of glorious colours warmed by the soft spotlighting of a standard lamp, it had never looked better. It was the perfect Monopoly desk, indeed the perfect room; perhaps, I speculated, not so very different in design and ambience from the setting in which Vic’s son Norman had played that first game in Britain sixty-six years before. And so I laid it all out, cards in their relevant on-board zones, title deeds fanned out in order, motor on GO, wad in hand.

  But I didn’t actually roll the dice; been there, I thought, done that. And then I thought: been where and done what? What had I found out about London? It was almost impossible to generalise, inevitably, because though London might have shrunk since the thirties, it remained far too large to encapsulate meaningfully, not so much a city but a nation: I don’t think I shall ever now forget that more people shop in Selfridge’s than live in Australia. But today it was more of a multination, a city that was home to more Cypriots than all but one in Cyprus and more Jews than any other in Europe. London told its stories in two hundred languages.

  And what a lot of stories it had to tell: I’d only covered twenty-two streets out of the city’s total of almost 50,000, yet those alone had yielded so much history that fitting even half of it into my head had necessitated the mental equivalent of sitting on the suitcase. The one certain legacy was that henceforth I would only ever be able to walk about London with associates who were either stone deaf or tirelessly scintillated by the words ‘And on your left . . .’

  I had learned many things about my city that I probably should have known already, but more than a few I probably shouldn’t, and with particular reference to Crossness Southern Outfall Works, now wished I hadn’t. I had seen the runic legend DRY RISER on the outside of a great many buildings, but never decoded its meaning. I had travelled back through time, from the medieval alleys behind Fleet Street to the imperial pomp of Trafalgar Square, and sometimes through national borders, to Parisian Piccadilly or Reichstag Regent Street. I’ve never been to the outskirts of Bucharest, and now that I’d walked up the Old Kent Road I don’t need to.

  Looking around the board before me I pondered the constants: that those who now worked in Whitehall or shopped along the green streets or lay flat on their bare backs in Leicester Square requesting in song to be shown the way home were still doing the same things in the same places as their urban predecessors a century before. Fleet Street looked the same but wasn’t, most of Oxford Street didn’t but was.

  A lot might have changed, but a lot more hadn’t, and that went for the whole of London. The City is now the wealthiest region in Europe, yet 43 per cent of London’s children live in households with incomes less than half the UK average, the highest proportion in the country. London’s skyline is about to be radically redrawn with half a dozen Canary Wharf sized towers going up in the decade ahead, but in general bickering and prevarication remain the planners’ watchwords: no sooner had the fate of that perennially vacant Trafalgar Square plinth apparently been decided than a campaign starts up to replace the rolling art show with a statue of the Queen Mother. London was like a game of Monopoly: dominated by ruthless but unpredictable speculators with both eyes on a quick buck, haphazardly developed and redeveloped, and unlikely ever to be finished. After fifty years of decline the city’s population is growing again, but no one seems to have even started thinking about where all these new Londoners will sleep and work and how they’ll travel between the two.

  And I could only conclude that the reason no one had bothered is that London has always muddled through in the end, and it had done that because its inhabitants had learned to concentrate not on long-term grand plans but on the day-to-day practicalities of city life – we looked after the hours, in other words, and somehow the years seemed to look after themselves. Because ours was the original modern metropolis, so Londoners have evolved into the ultimate urban beings, and if that means being grumpily taciturn on occasion it also means treating your fellow citizen with almost beatific tolerance, whether he looks or sounds very different from you, whether he’s utterly lost or utterly plastered, whether he’s toting a ball of crumpled cartography or a stout placard proscribing the sedentary consumption of fish and lentils. Londoners wrote the rule book for considerate metropolitan living: we are world leaders in queuing etiquette, the only capital urbanites to have learned that it is possible to hurry through a crowded street without the use of force. And it occurred to me that to do what I’d done in any other city would have involved the extra-cutaneous excretion of a lot more distress-related body brine: I’d not once been in any way concerned for my own safety, or rather when I had it was down to my own whimpering inadequacies.

  Only the traffic consistently flusters London, and suddenly enthused into direct action I whisked the racing car off GO, swallowed hard and put the top hat in its place. Free Parking, obviously, was the one square you’d have to bin if the board was to be meaningfully updated; but how, I pondered, would you update the rest? London was c
ertainly slipping ever westwards, and an estate agent I’d talked to said if he was asked to design the game from scratch he’d include Notting Hill, Knightsbridge and Chelsea. Mercifully, though, he hasn’t been, because thinking about it the only streets that didn’t deserve a place on the board now were generally the same ones who should never have been there in the first place: the oranges, Northumberland Avenue, the light blues. All such postulations, of course, overlook the uncomfortable truth that if Monopoly hadn’t existed, it would no longer have been necessary to invent it. The great shared history that is Monopoly could only have been written in the twentieth century; board games have had their day. The likes of Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary were the last hurrahs of a generation reared on dice and tokens, and even these were really just parlour games: stripped down to the bare bones, with no arcane rules or covert deals or great wads of cash. Looking again around the board it suddenly seemed a great pity. Hardly anyone actually lived in the Monopoly zone any more, and it was looking as if we’d even lost the desire to recapture the freewheeling, high-rolling city-centre thrills left behind when we all moved out to the dull suburbs.

  Recklessly incited – here I was, for heaven’s sake, in a hotel on Mayfair – I leapt up and did something unusual: I threw open the minibar and yanked out a half bottle of champagne. If I’d managed to find the tariff chart it probably would have gone straight back in again, but I didn’t, and standing on my balcony sent its cork spiralling high over the Bentleys beneath. The festive pop echoed back off the Georgian brickwork opposite, quickly followed by another sound as I lapped the overflow from the foiled neck, the sound of my conscience coughing. Prompted, I took a big hit of fizz and dialled Birna’s mobile.

  Two squares round the board, her spirits seemed to have bottomed out. Supper had finished before she’d found the basement kitchen, but a very friendly Armenian-looking factotum had creaked open a ‘big school-dinner warming oven thing’ and presented her with a huge and rather tasty plate of curry, eye-catchingly topped with a dollop of mashed potato. He’d also refilled her orange juice twice and quietly informed her that although her room was small, she was to think of the whole hotel as her home: a statement which interestingly didn’t seem to have struck her as one steeped in sinister foreboding. As I talked to her she’d just watched the end of Robot Wars in a dark room with a number of silent and expressionless men in late middle age – again a scenario which clearly wasn’t half as bad as it sounded – and was currently patrolling a long corridor lined with a multi-denominational selection of dusty religious statuettes. ‘It’s actually very interesting here,’ she said, and though I listened carefully it didn’t sound as if she was reading from a script with a chisel pressed to her throat.

  Succumbing to those Old Kent Road miles, I’d actually dropped off on Sofa A when she rang next. ‘There’s a letter Sellotaped to the wall here from the King of Benin,’ she muttered eagerly. ‘It looks like he stayed here once and they tried to get him to pull strings with some planning application.’

  These were not the sort of words to foist upon a still-waking man. ‘Guh?’ I said, but there was worse to come. ‘And remember that nice man I told you about?’ ‘Whu?’ ‘That Armenian bloke. He told me the President of Togo was a guest here when he was a kid, only he ended up getting shot in his room.’ ‘What? There?’ ‘No, no. Back in Togo. Some sort of coup. Oh, and this place was originally a Catholic girls’ school.’

  Birna was beginning to sound like Thelma in Scooby-Doo. What was Driscoll House doing to her? I might never know, but it was still doing it well past midnight.

  ‘A ghost?’ I repeated, now tucked up in that huge bed watching the news in German.

  ‘It was first seen here in 1952,’ she breathed with a sort of ethereal glee. ‘A silver lady . . . some say an angel.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘this is above and beyond the call of . . . of everything. I’m going to send a cab over.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Birna replied dismissively. ‘I’m fine.’

  So fine, in fact, that she didn’t show up until it was gone 11 the next morning, by which time I’d begun nibbling her share of the trolley-load of fried comestibles that a jolly but unbreeched waiter had wheeled dramatically in through the door of 106 as I peered uncertainly out of 105.

  ‘I’ve eaten breakfast already,’ she said lightly, taking her ease on Sofa B.

  ‘You had it . . . there?’

  ‘It would have been rude not to. Anyway, I’d paid for it.’

  These last four words might have defined large parts of my adult life, but I never thought to hear them from Birna’s lips. The management of the Driscoll House were clearly one house short of a hotel and now they’d been at my wife’s little green ones.

  ‘It was just very interesting, all that stuff about ghosts and the King of Benin. And, you know, the room was clean and had hot water and everything. Everyone was friendly. Odd, but friendly.’

  Birna had eaten sausages next to a Big Issue salesman; I’d lost my minibar virginity and – dramatic brass fanfare – pressed a pound coin into the room-service waiter’s hand, albeit rather too tightly. The Old Kent Road and Mayfair had taught us both a lesson; Monopoly had made us better people.

  ‘Though having said all that,’ she announced, pressing the sleeve of her coat to her nose, ‘I do smell like I’ve been on remand. I’m going to try that enormous bath out.’

  I looked at my watch doubtfully. ‘Better make it quick. We’ve got to check out in half an hour.’

  ‘Half an hour plus another twenty-four.’

  We exchanged even gazes, then Birna waved a hand lightly over the board I’d set up the night before. ‘Come on,’ she said mischievously, ‘we’ve all played Monopoly. No one swaps Old Kent Road for Mayfair.’

  ‘Not without a sweetener,’ I mumblingly conceded. Not only had she upgraded us to a suite before heading off to Driscoll House, she’d also checked it was free for another night.

  ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it,’ she continued blithely, plucking the relevant title deeds from the desk and consulting them closely, ‘that our bills last night exactly matched the respective rent with two houses.’ And with a big smile she held the cards up towards me.

  You know what that brown bill was, but I’m afraid its dark-blue equivalent appears to be stuck in my craw. Go look in the cupboard under the stairs and check for yourself.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Rachel Cugnoni, Suzanne Dean, Lara Soley Johannsdottir, John Bacon, Ian Hunter, Gudrun Agnarsdottir, Roger and Christina Bowdler, Simon and Catherine Moore, the Energy Saving Trust, Councillor Pat Haynes, the Audit Unit at Pentonville Prison, the staff at Lots Road power station, the Crossness Beam Engine Trust, Pall Matthiasson, Ron Beard, Susan Sandon, Mike Grabsky, and Birna, Kristjan, Lilja and Valdis.

  And finally, a fitful round of derisive applause for Hasbro, who have ensured you won’t be seeing a dog, boot, title deed or Monopoly board graphically represented within these pages. I am consequently delighted to confirm that this book is in no way endorsed by or associated with Hasbro, and indeed that the royalties they might otherwise have accrued are in every way endorsed by and associated with my wallet.

  Also available in Vintage

  Tim Moore

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  Epub ISBN: 9781409022169

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  Published by Vintage 2003

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  Copyright © Tim Moore 2002

  Tim Moore has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

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  ISBN 9780099433866