Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace
I shook the image away.
‘Where is it?’ I asked.
Somewhere central, please. Not Harrow, or Uxbridge, or Mudchute. The last thing I want is an hour’s trip to Mudchute to eat on my own at a bad Chinese.
‘Charlotte Street,’ she said, brightly.
Charlotte Street. I was just there. Just yesterday.
Blue coat. Nice shoes. The smile.
What if I’d talked to her last night? Properly talked to her?
‘It’s a six o’clock reservation.’
‘Six? You must know some people in some pretty high places.’
She smirked. I thought back to our uni days. When did we change? Were we still pretending to be grown-ups, more jaded and jaundiced than we were? I’m not sure who we were trying to impress: the world, or each other.
‘Whenever you can file is good,’ she said. ‘Ask them what they recommend, order whatever it is, keep your receipt, don’t go mad, and pay for your own booze. Also, keep Thursday night free.’
‘Why?’
‘Gallery opening.’
‘But I don’t know anything about art.’
‘I’m giving you work,’ she said. ‘I thought that’s what you wanted.’
I spent the journey home looking at the albums and DVDs she’d given me for review, trying to work out how I could make fun of their titles.
When I got back to the flat, I knew there would be emails. Ones I wouldn’t really want to read. Ones telling me what a fool I’d made of myself, how I should just grow up, and others full of concern for my mental health and saying things like, Hey, pal, if you ever want to talk.
So I checked them anyway.
Jase, wrote Ben. Do you want to meet up for a coffee? Might be good to chat.
Delete.
Jason, it’s Anna, wrote Sarah’s best friend, who’d been just waiting for this engagement to be announced so she could run around town organising horrible hen nights and buying pink fairy wings for everyone to wear as they crash and whoop and blunder their way into every Pitcher & Piano in Islington and beyond. I just think you need to take a long hard look at yourself and maybe reign in the drinking because it’s not healthy all this drinking, Jason. A pint does not solve anything, and you also need to let Sarah and Gareth live their lives because you had your chance and you need to be a grown-up about it.
There were another nine paragraphs below it.
Delete.
And then … uh oh.
Gary.
Jason. Listen, fella …
I cringed. He was using ‘fella’. He was going to be matey. Worse, he was going to be understanding.
Sarah doesn’t know I’m writing this, so best keep it on the downlow.
Of course she knows, Gary. Because you told her and she said it didn’t sound like a good idea, but you decided to be the bigger man about it, and she probably said, ‘God, that’s why I love you. It’s so amazing to be with an actual grown-up’, and then she stood there and read over your shoulder as you typed.
But I saw your messages and I just want to say I know how you must be feeling. I wouldn’t want to lose Sarah either. And the way it happened means I guess there are unresolved issues. If you ever want to talk …
And that’s where I had to stop reading.
I fired back a quick, Thanks, Gary, that’s really good of you, and I wandered downstairs to get Dev to shut up shop and come for a pint.
Because actually, Anna, sometimes a pint solves everything.
There can be nothing worse than sitting in a restaurant on your own, people who don’t often sit in restaurants on their own will tell you. But I don’t mind it. I get to think.
My afternoon with Dev Ranjit Sandananda Patel had ended at Postman’s Park. We seemed to end up at Postman’s Park a lot these days. Nestled between Little Britain and Angel Street, it’s the tiles we love.
I’ll explain.
In 1887, George Frederic Watts, the son of a humble piano maker, wrote to The Times with a brave new idea. An idea that would commemorate for all time the heroism shown by normal, everyday people. It would mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and stand as testament to ordinary lives given out of extraordinary good. It was a beautiful idea.
Dev and I would make a point of swinging by whenever we were near – and since the offices of London Now were just a few minutes away, that was often – and today, our pub crawl had taken us closer and closer. We didn’t have to say where we were going. We just knew.
Anyway, Watts’s letter to The Times did nothing. No one backed him. No one believed in him. So he did it anyway. And now, along one wall of an old church garden in the middle of the City of London, yards from what used to be the General Post Office, are dozens and dozens of glazed Royal Doulton tiles, each one commemorating another act of selfless, singular bravery.
We’d stood in front of one, and Dev had rolled a cigarette.
GEORGE STEPHEN FUNNELL, police constable, December 22 1899.
In a fire at the Elephant and Castle, Wick Road, Hackney Wick, after rescuing two lives, went back into the flames, saving a barmaid at the risk of his own life.
It was the silences after reading I most enjoyed.
‘Maybe,’ said Dev, at one point, ‘it’s because we’re not heroes. Maybe we don’t feel worthwhile because we’ve never done anything heroic.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t feel worthwhile.’
‘You do, though, don’t you?’ he said. ‘I do.’
I turned back, and read another.
ALICE AYERS, daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer, who by intrepid conduct saved three children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough, at the cost of her own young life.
‘I mean, we go about our daily lives,’ said Dev. ‘You write your reviews and I sell my games, and sometimes you sell my games and I write your reviews.’
I smiled, but Dev didn’t.
‘We feel like we’re doing things,’ he said. ‘But what are we really doing? What will we be able to say we’ve ever done?’
I thought about it.
‘I had some soup last Wednesday.’
Dev lit his fag and shook his head.
‘I’m serious, Jase. What if life’s about the moments? And what if you don’t take that moment? What if you don’t take that moment and another moment never comes? You could be remembered as a hero, or you could just be another person who quietly lived right up until the day they quietly died.’
He pointed at another tile.
‘George Lee,’ he said. ‘At a fire in Clerkenwell, carried an unconscious girl to the escape, falling six times, and died of his injuries. July 26, 1876.’
He paused.
‘He used the moment,’ he said.
‘So what do you recommend?’ I asked the waiter.
Abrizzi’s was fine. It had nice, functional decor (which I’ll have to call boring), efficient staff (Cold? No, robotic. Robotic is better), and, well, I don’t really know what else. What else do restaurant critics look out for? There was cutlery. Enough cutlery for me, certainly, although I didn’t know how to turn that into a negative. And bread – there was a small basket of bread. I guess it could have been slightly bigger.
‘The penne is excellent, we have very good veal,’ said the waiter, who moments before had split his sides laughing when he realised the reservation wasn’t for that Jason Priestley. I laughed along, too, even though, at thirty-two, the joke was just beginning to wear a little thin.
‘We also have pizzas, of course, the very best in town.’
‘Cool. What type of pizza?’
‘My favourite is a thin crust, with fresh tomato, plus a little basil, and mozzarella.’
‘A margherita?’
‘Well … an Abrizzi’s.’
A margherita seemed fitting.
‘I’ll have an Abrizzi’s.’
The waiter – whose name I then noticed was Herman, so I don’t think he’s got much right to laugh at others – wandered off with my
I snapped a breadstick in two.
But hey. This wasn’t so bad. Perhaps I looked mysterious to the people around me: this lone, dangerous man staring out on to Charlotte Street. Perhaps I looked like a trained killer, and everyone was craning their necks to see what a trained killer would order, and then be disappointed when it was a margherita and some Appletizer.
And then something remarkable happened.
Something that made me put my breadsticks down and sit right up. And then get right up. And then leave my margherita far behind, before it had even arrived.
I saw her.
THREE
Or ‘The Woman Comes and Goes’
‘So what happened?’ said Dev, excited. ‘To the pizza, I mean?’
He took a slug of his Polo-Cockta and did a little burp.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Did you just leave it? Had you paid?’
‘I don’t know what happened to the pizza. I presume they brought it out and then took it away again. Maybe they weaved it into the curtains. That’s not really the thrust of this story.’
‘I wonder if someone else took it? That’d be great, if every time you went to a restaurant you could just pilfer other people’s pizzas. Mind you, I suppose you were getting it free, so—’
‘Dev … the girl. The girl, Dev.’
‘Yes. Sorry. Go on. The girl.’
Because that’s the point. The girl.
She’d come out of nowhere.
One moment I’d been staring at my own reflection in the window, wondering if I could pass for a trained assassin, and the next, there was a small movement somewhere in the dark. As small as a flinch a mile away, but enough to shift my focus on what lay outside.
She was walking out of Snappy Snaps – same blue coat, different shoes, I think – and she was looking around.
For what? For me?
Of course not. But for something.
I stood up, almost involuntarily, hoping to catch her eye, all lit up in an Italian, maybe exchange a wave, but she couldn’t see me, and even if she did, she wouldn’t remember me. How odd it would be if she did.
‘Hi, I’m the fella who—’
‘You held some bags for me once.’
‘Yes!’
‘Okay, bye!’
And then, with a jolt, I remembered.
‘My jacket, can I get my jacket?’ I asked a waitress.
‘You’re finished?’
‘No, I just need something – I need my jacket.’
She pointed me towards the concierge desk, but the lady there was dealing with someone else, and I tried to make her see me, but she wouldn’t look round. I grabbed someone else, a man with a tray.
‘Hi, could I get my jacket?’
But he just smiled and said hello, and carried on walking.
I looked out the window. She was still there, still looking about.
Should I run out? Should I say, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, except you kind of do, but wait there for a second and I’ll bring you something’?
‘Yes, sir, how can I help you?’
At last. It had only been a matter of seconds, but at last.
‘I need my jacket, please! I’m on table … I don’t know what table, that one there with the breadstick and the Appletizer.’
She glanced round and for a second I lost the girl, but there she was, slightly further up the street, still looking around. I could do this.
‘Table 9. Mr Priestley?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jason Priestley!’ she laughed. ‘A celebrity!’
‘Yes, I know. Please, can I have my jacket?’
I’d lost sight of her now, but she couldn’t be far away, she’d be on the corner of Goodge Street at worst, but now Herman was taking his time fishing my jacket out of the cloakroom, and I started clicking my fingers and saying ‘Come on’ a lot, which didn’t really endear me to anyone. Finally, it arrived.
Was it still there? Still in my inside pocket? I patted to see.
Yes.
Now I was half-jogging down Charlotte Street, looking out for her, scanning both pavements …
There!
She was looking my way. Smiling. That smile. Arm in the air, waving.
I stopped in my tracks. She looked lovely.
And then the taxi she’d been looking for crept past me and slowed to a halt.
This was my chance. This was it.
‘So did you?’ asked Dev, wide-eyed. ‘Did you use the moment?’
I paused.
‘No.’
And I hadn’t. I’d frozen, for whatever reason. The camera was in my pocket – right there in my pocket. I could’ve held it up, and shouted, ‘Stop!’, and run over and handed it to her. And maybe then we could’ve got chatting, and she’d have suggested that wine, and I’d have suggested some dinner, and then, who knows? Maybe I’d have helped her get a better deal on a second-hand Golf.
Because for the second time in two days, this felt like a beginning. And for the second time in two days, it had not begun.
‘Why?’ said Dev. ‘Why oh why oh why?’
He’d drained his Polo-Cockta and tossed it in the bin. He opened another one.
‘What is that, anyway?’ I said.
‘You never had a Polo-Cockta? Oh, they’re brilliant. Bit like Coke, but a little more metallic.’
He took a swig and winced. I considered his question.
Why?
Why hadn’t I done something, said something? Because here’s the killer bit. As she climbed into the cab – unassisted this time – she’d seen me. I knew it. It was subtle, but it was there. The briefest of reactions, a tiny sliver of something, but something nonetheless. A quizzical glance, a tiny nose scrunch, something that told me she sort of thought she knew me. A pause of a millisecond, nothing more, and then into the cab, door shut, gone.
‘Or maybe,’ said Dev. ‘She was looking at you because you were a man, at night, standing perfectly still, staring straight at her, with one hand inside your jacket pocket.’
Maybe.
Still. At least I finally looked like an assassin.
‘And this thing, this—’
‘Single Use 35mm Disposable Camera,’ I said, turning it round in my hands.
‘Yeah. What are you going to do with that? Just hang around Charlotte Street, hoping she’ll turn up again so you can hand it to her?’
‘Twice in two days I’ve seen her on Charlotte Street. Both times near Snappy Snaps – once in it. She’s clearly into photography.’
‘Or maybe someone keeps nicking her cameras. And who uses disposables, anyway? She sounds like an oddball. So what are you going to do?’
I shrugged.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Come on.’
‘What can I do? And anyway, what do you mean, “What are you going to do?” Do about what?’
Dev took another swig, and just looked at me for a few seconds.
‘There are some good pubs around Charlotte Street,’ he said.
I dashed off my Abrizzi’s review that afternoon.
A magical slice of pizza heaven, I wrote, and then some other things that were complimentary, like how I’d been given just enough bread, and how the waiting staff were really excellent. Well, they knew my name now. That’s the problem with sharing your name with an early 90s icon. People remember you. It’s something to talk about on a dull day. Imagine if you worked in a shoe shop and you sold some Birkenstocks to a Shaquille O’Neal. You’d tell everyone. You’d text your friends and say, I’ve just served a bloke called Shaquille O’Neal! And they’d text back with stories of namesakes they went to school with: Rip Van Winkle and Toby Anstis and that kid in 4B who went to medical school and became Dr Dre.
Plus, Herman would remember I’d
Zoe had written a short email back.
Er, thanks for that. Must have been bloody incredible to get that kind of praise from you. Strange, I’d been told it was terrible. Is everything okay?’
How sad, I thought. People asking if you’re okay when you’re nice about something. Still. Imagine Herman’s happy face when he reads that.
I like pizza, is all, I replied, and closed my laptop.
It was just before six, and we were standing outside number 16 Charlotte Street. The Fitzroy Tavern. Corner of Windmill Street.
‘This is stupid,’ I said.
‘Dylan Thomas used to drink here!’ said Dev. ‘I wonder why he stopped.’
‘This is stupid,’ I said, again. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’
‘Didn’t you hear me? Dylan Thomas used to drink here! Where do you want to go? A Wetherspoons? Great – we might see Natalie Pinkham from The Wright Stuff.’
‘You’re not going to see Dylan Thomas! And since when did this become about “seeing” someone?’
‘You know who we’re here to see,’ said Dev.
Both times I’d seen this girl it’d been around six. Maybe she worked around Fitzrovia, I thought. Fitzrovia, named after this pub, in turn named after a man named Fitzroy. I admire any area that takes its name from a pub. There were others in London, of course. Angel. Manor House. Royal Oak. Swiss Cottage. Plus Elephant & Castle, which only ever made sense to me as a name when I realised that … let’s just say it remains incredibly fortunate that the pub wasn’t called the Vicar & Boobs or something, seeing as that’s the kind of thing that’s often been known to affect house prices.
And Dev was right about Dylan Thomas. The first time we came here, a toothy man in tweed down from Bristol for the day had told us it’d been a hub for artists and intellectuals and bohemians in the 20s and 30s and 40s. They’d crowd each corner, he’d said, swapping ideas, arguing drunkenly, fighting and loving, until the pub came to define the whole area. George Orwell drank here. Augustus John. Now it was people like me and Dev. You couldn’t help but think that if a pub could look disappointed, it would be looking just a little disappointed right now.