thought to an additional half-pint, but on this occasion moderation triumphed.
Pierce lived just off a Victorian garden square concealed behind Mile End Road – one of those hidden pockets of the East End that could be mistaken for Chelsea or Islington or my own Pimlico. For a nauseating moment I thought he might have the whole terraced house as his own, but there were two doorbells, with Pierce’s at the top. I rang, exchanged a couple of crackly words through the intercom, and heard feet on stairs.
I had seen Pierce’s picture in the newspaper profiles that had appeared before his seclusion: a round face under a shaved scalp, a combination that verged on the potatoey. But no potato had those eyes, dark and furious, always directed hard at the camera. No soulful chin-stroking or writerly gazing into space – arms crossed like a bouncer, staring you down. Only the photo on the back cover of Mile End Road differed: dark curly hair, retreating a little, glasses, the slightly affronted look of someone caught by surprise. Before he had settled his image. In Night Traffic, Pierce had speculated as to what had made him a target for muggers: he was five foot eight, a couple of inches shorter than me, and a little chunky. When he opened the door, though, he seemed at least my height and more; the slight doughiness of his frame manifested as pure presence and force. The eyes didn’t pin me down or fix on me like a laser or any of those clichés of command. It was as if he barely noticed me, catching my own gaze once, then breaking away, turning back into the hall.
‘Jack, yeah?’
‘Mr Pierce, great to meet you at last, I—’
‘Alan’s just left, surprised you didn’t see him.’
I was relieved. ‘Yes, I’m sorry I’m so late, I—’
‘Close the door, yeah? Just slam it.’ He was three steps up the stairs already, not looking back.
Pierce had the top two floors of the house – a flat more than twice the size of mine. At once I wondered if he owned or rented: the usual London question. Except that’s not the London question, not exactly. The question is: How are you here? How do you make it work? How do you supply what the city demands? More than half my salary went on the rent of my dark little flat and I dreaded the next increase. I was not making it work. How, then, did Pierce? The secret, shameful side of the London question was the accompanying desire to hear that the answerer was not making it work, that they were drowning in debt or crippled by mortgage payments or the flat had untreatable toxic mould or was the site of a recent and savage string of murders. Anything that would make one’s own failure sting a little less.
The flat was, at first, as you’d expect: I was led into a short corridor lined with knee-high piles of books, magazines, loose papers and copies of the Guardian and Standard. Like my own home. I knew at once what I’d find in the living room: a wall given over to bookshelves, either Ikea or built-in, wedged with books and decorated with a self-conscious sprinkling of postcards, invitations, photographs, mementoes and so on.
Wrong. At least two upstairs rooms had been knocked through to form Pierce’s living room, which ran all the way from the front of the house to the back, with big windows at each end. This yielded a long side wall that would have been perfect for metres of shelves. But this wall was instead filled with a huge map of London.
‘Map’ is in fact not a useful term to describe what Pierce had made. In the south, Biggin Hill and Purley were at skirting board level; the northern stretch of the M25, where it runs past Waltham Abbey, was at the ceiling cornice. The outer outline of Greater London was just about recognisable, as was the blue vein of the Thames where it widened in the east, and a few exposed green patches at Richmond, Blackheath, Epping and elsewhere. The rest of the city was obscured by a thick aggregation of matter, which lifted and shivered when Pierce threw open the door and walked into the room. It was a layer of sticky notes, index cards and clippings – several layers, from the look of it, anchored by hundreds of coloured thumb-tacks. Further notes encrusted the wall to the left and right of the map; the room also contained four metal filing cabinets and the usual living-space furniture: a three-piece suite facing a telly at one end of the room, a dining table and chairs at the other.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘The map?’ Pierce said with a pained expression. ‘I’ve been meaning to take it down.’
‘What? Why? What is it for?’
He didn’t answer, and instead waved an arm in the direction of the cracked brown leather sofa. ‘Sit. Sit. Coffee? Tea?’
‘Coffee would be great,’ I said, taking off my coat. I had to move a couple of magazines off the sofa in order to make a place for me to sit: a TLS and a Time Out. But before I sat I remembered the need for colour. Ignore Pierce’s instruction, check out the room. I approached the map.
The cacophony of information from the wall was overwhelming, and the accumulated ephemera was rarely less than five layers deep, obscuring most recognisable features. I traced the line of the river upstream until I found Pimlico. Notes on the surface included ‘Monster Tavern’, ‘Millbank Prison – Austr.’ and ‘Dolphin Square sex ring’. These were all scrawled in black and red biro on small Post-its and snippets of notepaper, some no larger than postage stamps. But beneath them was a much larger note, an index card inscribed with fat black marker pen, obviously one of the first things pinned to the wall when the map was new. To read it I had to move other accretions out of the way, revealing the letters one by one. It said: MISTRESS CITY.
‘Bick,’ Pierce said, making me jump. An orange Post-it, its adhesive exhausted, floated to the floor; I saw one or two were already there. ‘Unusual name – as in Bic ballpoints?’
‘With a k,’ I said, realising that Pierce must know the spelling perfectly well, having seen my name in emails. ‘As in Bicker. Or Bickle.’
‘Ha,’ Pierce said – definitely said, spoken, not a laugh. ‘“You talkin’ to me?”’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘It’s a pity it’s not Bic like the pens,’ Pierce said. He spoke with his back to me, busy making coffee in a small kitchen through an arch. ‘That would be a good name for a writer. I’m interested in nominative determinism. The idea that your name has power, that it influences what you choose to do in life. You’re, I don’t know, Mr Heal, so you become a doctor.’
Should I be recording this? I wondered. I fumbled one of my digital voice recorders out of my bag, switched it on, and dropped it into the breast pocket of my shirt. ‘Like our mutual friend,’ I said.
Pierce stopped what he had been doing – pouring milk into a little jug – and frowned over his shoulder at me.
‘F.A.Q.,’ I said, surprised he needed prompting. ‘Given that he’s all over the internet.’
‘Aha,’ Pierce said. ‘Well, that doesn’t count. It’s concocted. Francis is his middle name. Eric Francis Quin. He ditched the Eric and added the A in the nineties. The A doesn’t stand for anything.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.
‘Not many people do, I think,’ Pierce said. ‘He doesn’t publicise the fact. I only know ’cause I’ve been to his flat. I saw some post there and asked about it. I think he’s embarrassed by it now. I mean, FAQs are a bit dated. A bit web one-point-oh for Francis. A bit of sleight-of-hand with the facts on some bulletin board twenty years ago and it ends up haunting him like that.’
‘Yeah, embarrassing,’ I said. I was starting to feel a bit wobbly. In the past, my legs had betrayed me when others were watching and it was a misfortune I wanted to avoid with Pierce. Especially as it was all going well so far – my lateness barely remarked upon, not having to compete with Alan, Pierce proving chatty, not the surly, laconic artist-hermit I had expected. ‘He should update it.’
‘Ha, yes,’ said Pierce. ‘S.T.F.U., maybe.’
I returned to the sofa. ‘Did Alan get any pictures of you with the map?’ I asked, full of hope. It