Tales of the City 04 - Babycakes

in late, or you don’t come at all. Nothin’ personal,”
The light dawned. The Falklands war. The Argies were Argentines. Americans didn’t call them that, because Americans had never cared. You had to start killing people before you took the trouble to give them nicknames. Japs, Krauts, Commies, Cooks … Argies. He had no intention of prolonging the war by arguing with this man. “I like your battle hymn,” he said.
“Eh?” The driver looked at him as if he were crazy.
“ ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.’ Isn’t that what the troops sang, or something?”
The driver grunted, apparently convinced that Michael was crazy. What did a bloody song have to do with anything? He stopped talking altogether, and Michael breathed a secret sigh of relief as the cab sped past the pale green blur of Hyde Park.
He had been away from this city for sixteen years, the longest time he’d been away from any spot on earth. He had lost his innocence here—or, more accurately, found it—at a lime when mod was in flower and the streets were swarming with legions of while-lipped, black-lashed “birds,” He had met a corduroy-clad bricklayer on Hampstead Heath and gone home with him and learned in an instant just how simple and comforting and beautiful real life could actually be.
The bricklayer had resembled a younger, leaner Oliver Reed, and Michael could recall every detail of that distant afternoon: the statue of David next to his bed, the brown sugar crystals he used in his coffee, the physique magazines he left lying around where anyone could see them, the silken feel of his hairless scrotum. Your first stranger, it seemed, is the one you remember for the rest of your life.
Where was he now? How old would he be? Forty-five? Fifty?
The cab veered left at Marble Arch, a landmark he recognized, then they appeared to follow the Bayswater Road along the edge of a large public garden. Which one? He couldn’t remember. He was punch-drunk with fatigue and depressed by the rain, so he seized upon passing English icons to bolster his morale:
A shiny red mailbox.
A zebra crossing like the one on the Abbey Road album.
A pub sign banging in the wind.
The game became tougher when the cab moved into a region of plastic Pizza Huts and tawdry ethnic restaurants. It wasn’t an unpleasant district, really, just surprisingly un-English—more akin to the Haight-Ashbury than anything he had experienced during his earlier visit.
Then the landscape became residential again. He caught glimpses of tree-lined streets and oversized Victorian row houses with crumbling plaster facades. Black children romped in the rain beside a yellow brick wall on which someone had spray-painted: STUFF THE ROYAL WEDDING.
He spotted a street sign that said COLVILLE . “Isn’t this it?” he asked the driver.
“That’s Colville Terrace, mate. You want the Crescent. It’s just up the way a bit.”
Three minutes later, the cab came to a stop. Michael peered out the window with mounting dread. “Is this it?” he asked.
The driver looked peeved. “You wanted Number Forty-four, didn’t you?”
“Right.”
“Then that’s it, mate.”
Michael checked the meter (a modern digital one that looked odd in the classic cab) and handed the driver a five-pound note with instructions to keep the change. He was overtipping, but he wanted to prove that a man who knew nothing about wars and streets could be generous just the same.
The driver thanked him and drove off.
Michael stood on the street and gaped at Simon’s house. Its plaster facade, apparently a victim of dry rot, was riddled with huge leprous scabs which had fallen away completely in places to expose the nineteenth-century brick beneath. For some reason, this disfigurement went straight to the pit of his stomach, like bone glimpsed through a bloodless wound.
He dismissed a flickering hope that there might really be a Nottingham Gate and headed past overturned garbage cans (dust bins, the English insisted on calling them) to the front door of the three-story building. His dread became palpable when he found the name BARDILL printed on a card by the door buzzers.
He set his suitcase by the door, found the designated key, and wiggled it into the lock. A dark corridor confronted him. He located the light switch—a circular push thing—on a water-stained wail papered with purple roses. The door to Simon’s ground-floor flat was at the end of the corridor on the right. By the time he had found the right key