Do Not Pass Go Page 4

  This surely explains why the statue was pulled down after only six years, and why few thought it disrespectful thenceforth to employ the structure beneath, which had been a police station, as a pub. It hadn’t been a cross, and now it didn’t have a king. Three years later the whole thing was demolished along with the smallpox hospital, and on its site arose what was at that time the nation’s largest railway station.

  A transport hub with a dozen axles, as well as the mainline station King’s Cross was serviced by London’s first bypass, the west–east New Road, the Grand Union Canal, and, from 1863, the world’s first underground railway. In all the bustle and noise it wasn’t surprising that no one stopped long enough to notice how rundown the area was becoming.

  In 1935 King’s Cross still rang with whistles and clanks and the shouts of trunk-trundling porters – that year there were 400,000 unionised railway employees – but in the contemporary photographs I’d seen the neglect was already obvious. Scenes more typically associated with British Rail’s well-chronicled seventies nadir tolled out in black and white: sullen operatives scraping trolleys along ravaged plaster and brickwork; a de-wheeled old goods van in farmyard condition pressed into service as the platform 1 staff room.

  I’d never before stopped to pay much attention to the station or its environs, and I doubt that Victor Watson would have either: Waddingtons’ London office was in St James’s, a few stops west down the Piccadilly line which he’d have hopped straight on to. For Vic and Marge, though, that day would be different. To appraise London’s real estate in terms of its economic and aesthetic value they’d need to keep their eyes open. Standing outside the plain brick arches of the station and peering through four lanes of Euston Road traffic, they’d have been faced by the ornately tiled Reggioni’s restaurant, Stewart and Wight’s Cocoa Rooms and Temperance Hotel and the splendid twin turrets of the Regent Theatre. It was still a place for nice people to hang about in, respectably idling away the hours before their train left.

  At least that was the theory. Because with all those new bus and Tube connections there were no hours to idle away: you just turned up and got on your train. And so the nice people stopped hanging about King’s Cross, to be replaced by others for whom the huge throughput of humanity represented both an enviable customer base and perfect cover. In the early thirties, a huge banner slung across the Regent Theatre’s façade read: ‘Visitors to London: Enjoy a Good Play and Catch Your Train’. The Regent isn’t around now, but if they’d kept the banner that Good Play would have devolved into a Grubby Shag, and Your Train into Hepatitis C.

  King’s Cross these days is nationally synonymous with kerb-crawling, football violence and brazenly conducted class A drug deals. Feeling like, and in my bedrizzled old anorak uncomfortably resembling, a character in that ‘touch of flu’ heroin-screws-you-up campaign, as I emerged from beneath the mid-seventies car-port canopy I felt the CCTV cameras that now infest King’s Cross turn on me like the paparazzi on Posh, panning and zooming restlessly.

  Out front the downbeat, neglected transience that characterises many European railway terminuses still lingers: an amusement arcade, two McDonald’s, kebab shops and the sort of convenience stores that sell stupidly strong lager, crisps illegally split from multipacks, and pornography. But a lot of money is being spent in the area – £4 billion over the next fifteen years on both the Channel Tunnel rail link and an improbably ambitious commercial and residential development – and no one wants the pitch queered by undesirables. A local TV news report I’d seen the week before revealed that the hoardings lining all the pavements around the station weren’t erected solely to conceal construction work, or even to ease pedestrians into the bus lanes, but to deny cover to tarts and dealers. That and the nosy cameras had apparently eased much antisocial behaviour a few streets back from the station, but by the same token the overbearing surveillance seemed a provocation, inspiring a desire to rebel against the police state, to play up to the cameras, to do the bad stuff they were so keen to stop you doing. King’s Cross was a naughty place, and if you wanted to find out why, perhaps you ought to deal with some of the naughty people on their own terms.

  I tried to disabuse myself of this preposterous theory while despatching a rather toothsome £5.95 lunchtime special at a curry house opposite the station, a three-course delight blemished only by the management’s decision to describe the main dish’s principal ingredient as ‘bird’. It shouldn’t have been too difficult. Through the furious mess of traffic I noted two lank women effecting some dead-eyed sleight-of-hand exchange on a stepping-stone traffic island; outside McDonald’s a blistered wino was heroically engaging an imagined foe. If you were going to sail that close to the wind, you might at least hope it blew you off on some voyage of discovery. What would I learn while hastily selecting a foil-wrapped rock of adulterated crack from a dealer’s mouth or splitting eight cans of Diamond White with an incoherent gentleman of the road?

  Aware that my focus was tightening in on the only remaining element of King’s Cross’s unholy trinity, I absent-mindedly paid up and set off towards the mean-street hinterland. Tarts were by tradition blessed with hearts of gold, I assured myself, in a way that crack-heads and piss-artists were not. I had merely to locate a suitably approachable example and engage her in streetwise banter; the inside story of King’s Cross would be laid out before me by someone who’d seen it all, who’d been there, done that and wet the T-shirt.

  But if there’s one thing Monopoly should have taught me, it’s that you’ve got to pay to play. No fees, no favours. I’d taken barely a step before acknowledging the dominant flaw of a scheme which effectively required one to chat up a prostitute. Bob Hoskins had a go in Mona Lisa, and even he hadn’t been able to handle it. However traumatic it would be, money was going to have to change hands.

  With bits of bird and knots of anxiety binding my innards I wondered if this could really be happening: that after thirty-seven years of generally stout moral conduct I was going off to pay a street courtesan for her services. It made it only slightly less awful, but substantially more ridiculous, to decide that these services would comprise a game of Monopoly.

  Though as with everything I am about to say this fact is coloured by an unfamiliarity with the protocol, I imagined three in the afternoon as an off-peak time in the sex industry. Certainly there were no obvious candidates standing by lampposts with hands on pencil-skirted hips. And though my board-game plan had initially seemed a brilliant face-saving, and indeed marriage-saving compromise – one could convincingly argue Monopoly to be the definitive opposite of sex – even vaguely formulating a relevant business-touting approach conjured scenes which invariably ended with me being assessed for face repairs by a huge man wearing half a branch of Ratners about his person.

  ‘Excuse me, I’ve got a rather unusual request . . .’

  If the apologetic Hugh Grant gambit warranted the most serious physical retribution, any cheeky upfrontness was hardly better: ‘Take a Chance with me, love, or you’ll end up with another £10 fine.’ ‘Wanna win second prize in my beauty contest?’

  For half an hour I kerb-walked the district, pausing momentarily outside a couple of promisingly tawdry massage parlours but otherwise finding no evidence of the vice plague I’d heard and read so much about. I was thinking of less irksome methods of encapsulating the outlaw ambience of King’s Cross when I walked past a phone box and noticed its glazed area completely obscured by a mosaic of coloured postcards.

  With the coast clear I snatched a handful, crammed them into my rucksack and strode briskly away, through the inconsequential annexe that houses the most famous railway platforms in Britain: 10, under which, some say, Boadicea is buried, and 9¾, from where Harry Potter catches the Hogwart’s Express. On the grounds that Harry Potter is a fictional wizard I suppose it doesn’t matter that the furthest you can travel from any platform in the annexe appeared to be Stevenage, any more than it matters that the some who say the Boadicea thing are fooli
shly deluded (expert opinion places her bones near Colchester).

  The solitude required for my awkward task wasn’t hard to locate given the proximity of the old marshalling yards behind King’s Cross, earmarked for that huge redevelopment but currently a brownfield wasteland so extensive that some quick-witted entrepreneur has knocked up a 250-yard golf driving range in a far-flung corner.

  With the unearthly turbine roar of departing northbound expresses reduced to a spin-cycle drone I sat down on a broken pallet by the shell of a building labelled ‘Coal Depot’ and examined my haul. Top of the deck was a snarling Valkyrie in a rubber dress and a Catwoman mask: ‘DOWN ON YOUR KNEES!’ barked the motto above a phone number. Hers was the first to be cast aside with an inner yelp of distress, quickly followed by a hairy chest labelled ‘I was a woman’ in a discard pile that soon grew into a teetering stack. Baby cosseting, clinical fantasies, water sports – with a little lateral thought I could usually work out what type of awfulness I was avoiding, but sometimes (‘A level Greek’; ‘TV shoplifter’) I couldn’t.

  I reached the last card – ‘If you don’t find the same nurse as in this picture, you leave straight away’ – with a sense of bewilderment and dread. Such was the spectrum of perversion it had seemed at least possible that I’d turn up a card headed ‘I’ll make your house into a hotel’ above a winking Auntie Pennybags, but after an extensive cull I was left with just four, two emblazoned with the radiant catchphrase ‘I like my job’, one ‘fun, fat and fifty’ – I figured at least she’d have been round the board a few times – and a ‘melon relief’.

  The ensuring mobile calls engendered levels of telephonic apprehension unknown since adolescence. By failing to pick up their phones the first two offered perhaps a more honest assessment of their levels of career satisfaction, and the owner of the voice that answered fun, fat and fifty was either only two-thirds right or they’d printed the number of the local builder’s merchant by mistake. I slammed the phone down as literally as current mobile technology permits, and it was melon relief’s turn at the next call when I initiated our conversation by blurting out that I just wanted to play a game of Monopoly without any funny business.

  Features puckering in distaste, I picked up the discards and slowly flicked through them. Bound to please, blow your mind with my behind, thank you sir may I have another – oh no. No no no no no. However nasty Monopoly sometimes turned, it never turned that nasty. Rarely, anyway. In the end I decided to try everyone who didn’t threaten to wee on me or inflict pain.

  ‘Hellogabbyspeaking,’ fluttered the softly Hispanic voice at the end of the line.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, in a brisk and strident tone intended as the antithesis of the textbook salivatory perv-o-mumble. ‘I came across your . . . I found your card in a telephone box and was just wondering about your schedule for the afternoon.’

  ‘Yes . . . is OK today. Wish service you require? You know my rate?’

  ‘No, no I don’t,’ I said, still as if arranging a quote for weatherproofing external woodwork.

  ‘Is forty pounds for thirty minute sensual massage.’

  ‘Right . . . um, what it is, I mean, what I’m interested in isn’t so much that as playing Monopoly.’

  ‘Playing in Napoli?’

  ‘No, no. It’s, um, a game. A board game? Very popular all over the world. I’m sure you’ll know it when you see it. Yes. And obviously your company, maybe having a chat while we played. The game. Of Monopoly.’

  There was a pause, and for a moment I thought I’d lost another one. When at length the voice spoke again it was both tentative and reluctant.

  ‘The game . . . is, ah, dangerous in some way?’

  And so there I was half an hour later, walking away from a cashpoint with £40 out of the spousal joint account, £40 I was about to hand over to Gabby, who perhaps at this point I should explain described himself as a pre-operation Brazilian transsexual new to the UK. Shielding face with backpack I pressed the relevant intercom in an only slightly rundown street round the back of Camden town hall, as confident as I could be that the looming experience would simply involve an expensive game of Monopoly with a bloke in a dress rather than the joyous throwing open of some previously treble-locked door in the darker corridors of my sexual psyche.

  The Gabby who opened the door of the first-floor flat bore little resemblance to the Gabby who appeared on the postcard – less of the willowy lady-boy and more of the wobbly lady-man. Brushing a strand of his waist-length wavy black hair from a broad face thickly caked in powder and dominated by bulbously collagen-crammed lips, Gabby smiled slightly and gestured me in; I nodded gruffly and wondered if shaking hands would send out the right signals.

  Gabby’s flat was in fact rather fun in an eighties art student way: tall walls decorated with zebra-skin tapestries and an enormous chrome-Sputnik light fitting swinging gently from the ceiling. On the other hand – and at this point I’d like to welcome you aboard the Euphemism Express – its air was overbearingly impregnated with an unwelcome aroma, the aroma in fact of an adolescent male’s bed linen after a month of prodigiously consummated nocturnal imaginings.

  Trying to ignore the signals my nose was bellowing to my brain I whisked out the board with a manly cough. ‘Right. We might need a table for this.’ I’d gone for my fifties set, comfortably the most presentable – in such pristine condition that it had quite clearly never before been played (though regrettably, as with all but the very earliest Darrow-era sets, of diminutive Antiques Roadshow potential given the enormous number produced each year). It even retained the little slip you were advised to include with any complaints about missing contents; scanning the room for a flat surface I wondered how the cited John Waddington employee who had approved the set for despatch, Checker 22, would have felt on learning that the next pair of hands on the banknotes he’d counted up fifty years earlier were tipped with maroon varnish and belonged to a pre-operation Brazilian transsexual.

  ‘We play here,’ said Gabby, indicating a long blue sofa which wasn’t nearly as spartan or businesslike as I might have wished.

  I slapped the board down on the upholstery and set out the title deeds and Chance and Community Chest cards, holding out the tokens for his perusal. ‘I take . . . this,’ he said, plucking the dog from my hand.

  ‘My sister always chose that,’ I replied automatically, and Gabby looked at me, his immaculately decorated brown eyes soft with a kind of matter-of-fact empathy.

  ‘I understand. So you are . . . addict to this game?’

  That was a bad moment, one that became worse as I endeavoured to disabuse him of this interpretation. Hoping to palm Gabby off (oh, please) with a story about researching an alternative guide to Monopoly-board London, I succeeded only in convincing him that my mission was to play the game with as many transsexuals as possible. Once happy that the newspapers were not involved in any way, he couldn’t have cared less, nodding distantly through my increasingly garbled bletherings before politely requesting payment up front. Handing over those crisp twenties I realised that by Gabby’s standards there was nothing unusual about a client initially reluctant to confess an obscure and shaming fetish. Reluctant, anyway, until the arousal became too intense to bear, until the trigger point when Gabby turned over the adulterated Community Chest card that would begin his brutal manual harvest: ‘IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY: COLLECT 10 PINTS FROM EACH PLAYER.’

  While narrowing my choices I’d instantly dismissed the two post-operational transsexuals, along with the grotesquely butchered shambles implied by the card labelled ‘½ opt’. But now I found myself contemplating the stark reality that in a purely physiological sense, we are all pre-operation transsexuals. And forty quid was forty quid – I might want to get my money’s worth.

  ‘Yes, yes – we have like this in Brazil. Some long time ago I play . . . but in Brazil game is called Bank, Banco . . .’ As I’d predicted, Gabby’s ignorance of the game diminished once he’d taken stock of the board’s lay
out.

  ‘Banco Imobiliario,’ I said, and was again treated to that limpid, understanding gaze as Gabby pulled the hem of his PVC microskirt down over wide stocking tops and sat by the other side of the board. From a coffee table cluttered with unopened Tia Maria miniatures and – oh dear – boxes of Kleenex, he retrieved three identical mobile phones and lined them up neatly on the board beside the Chance cards.

  The meter was running and I ran swiftly through the rules, sticking the dog next to the racing car on GO before handing Gabby the dice. With admirable nonchalance he rolled, and eschewing the highest-score-goes-first rule, I let him go with his double three. ‘The Angel,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I buy this.’

  Almost immediately everything somehow seemed more normal; Monopoly was a homely international language and we were both speaking it. Handing over the title deeds of properties Gabby purchased allowed me to discuss the game and the streets without sounding too mad. He seemed more familiar with the board’s extremes – a good friend lived in Whitechapel, and with a shy half-laugh he confessed to many professional assignments in Mayfair.

  I hoped someone would land on King’s Cross, and when he did I falteringly managed to coax out a few biographical details. After leaving Brazil for a protracted tour of Europe’s capitals, Gabby had settled in London two years ago, and though King’s Cross was ‘maybe ugly’ – snapping up Piccadilly he stated a wistful desire for a West End flat – he felt at home here because of its tolerance. ‘All London is like this,’ he breathed in that child-like monotone. ‘The people are not always so . . . happy, but so many different people and culture and everybody get on, make no trouble.’