short and dark with narrow pavements, banked by a cramped dry-cleaner’s and a cramped café. But you’re through it in moments, and you’ll explode onto Regent Street. Don’t overestimate the speed of the buses, don’t wait for the pedestrian crossing or the traffic lights, just run across the road, it will take them forever to catch you. Walk straight up part two of Air Street. Cheers, the themed pub full of American summer students and interns, is on the right. At nighttime it gets packed with young English guys, all hoping to get lucky with a sorority girl giddy and drunk on dreams of Prince William.
China White is on this street. It’s no more than a hole in the wall, an unassuming door and some Chinese letters by the side of a tiny box window that has fairy lights in it against a white background. You can’t actually see in, but I think they can probably see out. Trendy eyes dancing at the window, searching for the next victim of an undisclosed door policy. You’re at the bottom of Soho.
At school, Helen and I and a group of boys in our class threw stones at a girl called Jenny with buckteeth and big ears and a lazy eye. One lunchtime we threw stones at her in the playground. I held on to mine for ages, rolling it around in my ten-year-old hand, desperate to drop it on the ground and just run away, but then somebody saw me hesitating, so I threw it low and fast and it hit her on the knee. I saw a trickle of blood squirt down her leg onto a dirty sock that sat lazily around her calf because the elastic had gone. She didn’t cry, just stood in the corner covering the one side of her glasses that wasn’t protected by plasters to gee up her lazy eye. She wasn’t allowed to get the good glass scratched, those glasses were expensive I’d heard her mother shout at her when she picked her up from school most days. Jenny’s mum wore a fur coat and Jenny wore socks that didn’t stay up. Jenny’s mum would half talk, half shout – ‘Did you scratch that glass? It’s expensive!’ – and Jenny would say ‘no, no, no’ really quickly, three times like that in succession, as she ran to keep up with her mother’s old fur. She did the same in class, when Mrs Campbell asked if it was Jenny who had knocked pink paint all over the aprons. It wasn’t her at all: it was Adam Moody. Mrs Campbell didn’t punish her or anything, she just assumed that she had been close by, and she was clumsy, and I suppose a little ugly and easy to blame. The day we threw stones I heard Jenny muttering ‘no, no, no’ as she covered the good glass …
Helen and I haven’t spoken about it again. But I’m racking them up, all these bad deeds that make me hate myself. I threw a stone at Jenny, and then I took Ben from his wife.
Walk through Golden Square. Cut through one gate on the south side, and exit at the gate on the east side. There are already a couple of men sitting on different benches, swigging from cans of lager. One of them looks unwashed and tired and drunk and old. He has bare feet and long dirty toenails that you glimpse by accident but you will never be able to forget. He looks like he is cultivating those nails to enable him to scamper up trees, forage for berries. They could lever him into bark, half man, half cat. The other guy looks ordinary, in jeans and a T-shirt. But he has a can of special brew too.
The night that I met Ben, in a bar on Old Compton Street, he stared at me for twenty-five minutes. At first I thought he might be having some kind of seizure or fit. He just stared. His friends were talking around him, but he wasn’t engaging with the conversation. I thought it suggested passion, which is rare these days. It was quite something to feel the heat of his undiluted attention. Something about me meant that he couldn’t look away. I was unnerved but amazed. It felt terribly wonderful.
I went over to Ben and introduced myself. We realised within twenty minutes that both our dads are called Patrick, and that they both wear a glass eye. Those things aren’t that common. I’m not superstitious, but … The difference is that my dad lost one of his real eyes playing national league badminton, and if he has three beers at family parties he pops the phony one out to scare the kids. Ben’s dad lost his eye in an accident at the printing factory, but refuses to admit that he has a glass one. I don’t know how that works exactly, but I hope he cleans it …
Ben snores so loudly I have tried to convince myself it’s not even him. It’s such a huge noise that some nights it is impossible to sleep through. I make-believe that it is a large and loud wind pushing through an autumn forest, or a gentle wave thudding onto a Thai beach as I rock in a hammock between two palm trees. I keep thinking it might help soothe me back to sleep. It hasn’t worked once.
Everything that I thought I knew has changed. Men say they like a challenge, when really they don’t. They want an easy life. They think somebody promised it to them. Women think that somebody promised them a white wedding and a baby, and happiness as well. Secretly we feel cheated without them. If only the dress and the baby were all it took.
Walk past the flower stall at the top of Berwick Street market, through to Wardour Street. Cut through St Anne’s Court, past the tour guide telling a group of German tourists that the Beatles recorded some of their biggest hits here, except he can’t remember which ones exactly, at this very studio. Cross over Dean Street, and through Soho Square. They have shut the little house in the middle of the square, because of drugs and booze and cottaging. They closed down half of Soho Square’s smiles at the same time. But people still lie on the grass in all weathers with cardboard coffees next to them at nine-fifty in the morning. Walk through and towards Charing Cross Road. Turn right. You’re out of Soho.
I consider darting into Grey’s. It’s the large bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It’s been there for just over a century, getting bigger and bigger, gradually stocking more and more cookery and diet books. And other books, all the other kinds. I was in Grey’s twice last week. Isabella works behind the counter, mostly on the till. She’s a reason to buy, a need to delve into my purse, a depository for my loose change. I met her first by accident three weeks ago. I tripped over a woven mat at the front of the store as I nipped in to buy a poetry book for grand borrowed words for Ben’s third anniversary card – we don’t count the affair; we go from after that, from when he left – so I didn’t have to think of my own. I copied into his card:
A long time back
When we were first in love
Our bodies were always as one
Later you became
My dearest
And I became your dearest
Alas
And now beloved lord
Our hearts must be
As hard as the middle of thunder
Now what have I to live for?
I was wearing impractical grey court shoes that day, with three-inch heels and purple soles. Some days I feel like I’m balancing on the top of the world in stilettos, and everybody is watching as I try to keep my balance and still look good, in heels. My purple soled shoes point violently before me with every step that I take, leading me on. It was one of these points that caught under the mat as I ran in, and I almost collapsed, tripping forwards, halfway between running and falling, not sure how it would end. I stopped myself by diving into a table of books by an author whose repackaged backlist was hot property now he’d had a bestseller. A few copies of his second book fell to the floor but I didn’t bother to pick them up, knowing they’d be sold in twenty minutes anyway. I straightened and checked myself, muttering ‘shit’ under my breath, and looked around to see if anybody had noticed. I saw her then, oblivious to what was happening with me, leaning forwards on the counter with her elbows beneath her, flicking through Vogue.
Her hair is unkempt as if she’s been out the back sleeping or shagging in a storeroom, and her long, dirty-blonde tresses have been mussed up. She has these huge breasts. They jut out like balloons about to burst. Her eyes are always smudged with black kohl, and her lips are glossed with a cheap little stick that she keeps under the counter. Her voice is deep and her words are rounded and moneyed. Grey’s know there is a reason to put her on that desk, front of store, like a poster, but the living