Tales of the City 04 - Babycakes

the platform of the Northern Line, where a once-dormant signal in the back of his brain advised him that the Edgware train, not the High Barnet, would take him to Hampstead.
He loved the particulars of all this: The classic simplicity of the Underground map, with its geometric patterns and varicolored arteries. The warm, stale winds that whipped through the cream-and-green-tile pedestrian tunnels. The passengers—from skinheads to pinstripers—all wearing the same mask of bored and dignified disdain.
When the train stopped at Hampstead, his next route was indicated by a sign saying WAY OUT , a nobler phrase by far than the bland American EXIT . Since Hampstead was London’s most elevated neighborhood, the lift to the street was London’s deepest, a groaning Art Nouveau monster with a recorded voice so muted and decrepit (“Stand clear of the gate,” it said) that it might have been a resident ghost. He remembered that voice, in fact, and it gave him his first shiver of déjà vu.
The streets of the borough were mercifully unchanged, despite the encroachment of fast-food parlors and chrome-and-mauve salons specializing in “hair design.” He strolled along the redbrick high street until he came upon the hulking redbrick hospital that stood by the street leading to New End Square.
Four minutes later, he was hesitating in front of the house that had been his home for three months in 1967. The chintz curtains that had once shielded the living room from the gaze of passersby had been replaced by Levolors. Did a gay person live there now? Had the Mainwarings retired to some characterless “estate home” in the suburbs? Could he deal with the changes, whatever they were? Did he really want to know?
He really didn’t. Returning to the high street, he ate lunch in one of the new American-style hamburger joints, a “café” decorated with neon cacti and old Coca-Cola signs. Once upon a time, he recalled, Wimpy bars had served the only hamburgers in London, but they had hardly qualified.
He downed several ciders at an old haunt in Flask Walk, then considered his options for the afternoon. He could stroll over to the Spaniards Inn and down one or two more. He could look for the house where the inventor of the Christmas card had lived. He could wander down to the Vale of Health and sit by the pond where Shelley had sailed his paper boats.
Or he could look for the bricklayer.
Another cider settled the issue. Shelley and the inventor of the Christmas card were no match for the memory of a hairless scrotum. He breezed out of the pub and ambled along the pale green crest of the city toward Jack Straw’s Castle and the Spaniards Road.
The heath was much as he had remembered it—rolling reaches of lawn bordered by dark clumps of urban forest. There seemed to be more litter now (which was true of London in general), but the two-hundred-acre park was still rife with the stuff of mystery. On his last visit, the sound of the wind in its thick foliage had instantly evoked an eerie scene from Blow-Up, a movie which meant London to Michael in the way that Vertigo meant San Francisco.
He entered the heath from the Spaniards Road, following a broad trail through the trees. When he reached Hampstead Ponds, he stopped for a while and watched a trio of children romping along the water’s edge. Their mother, a freckled redhead in a green sweater and slacks, smiled at him wearily as if to thank him for the tribute he had paid her offspring. He smiled back and skipped a stone on the water, just to get a rise out of the kids.
It was here, he remembered, that a road led down to the south end of the heath and the street where the bricklayer had lived. The street where he lived. He laughed out loud at his gay rewrite, then began humming the tune from My Fair Lady.
The street was called South End Road. He remembered it because it intersected with Keats Grove, the street where the poet had lived, and Keats had been one of the things they had discussed after sex, along with Paul McCartney, motorcycles and world peace.
He found the place almost immediately, recognizing the nightingales in the Edwardian stained glass above the door. This was no time to think, he decided. He threw caution to the winds and rang the bell of the ground-floor flat. An old man in a cardigan came to the door.
“This is kind of unusual,” Michael began, “but a friend of mine lived here a long time ago, and I was wondering if he still does.”
The old man squinted