what they like with it.’
‘I guess so.’
In truth, I didn’t mind Bella as much as I might. She at least kept her low opinion of me heavily gilded with courtesy and cheer – I imagine she has no idea how she comes across. It’s him I can’t stand, Dan, her husband. A prime Mumford. I would happily murder Dan.
The front door sticks a little when it’s closed, and on occasion it needs a real bang to shut properly. This bang dislodged something from the letter flap, and this something fell with a turn that suggested the beat of a white wing.
A postcard from my parents: pretty toy-like buildings lined up on a picturesque quay. Could be anywhere. Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stavanger, Lübeck. Five years ago, Dad had retired, and Mum had decided to join him. So this was victory, for them. They shared a belief – a widespread and wholesome belief – in the fixed path of virtue. School, as a path to University, as a path to a Proper Job (proper – an important qualifier, that). All this was the infrastructural spine that supported Marriage, Mortgage, Family and Responsibilities. But what was at the end of this path? What lay at the sun-touched horizon? What was the reward? Retirement, that’s what.
This might make them sound stuffy and orthodox – brittle mannequins of small-minded propriety cursed with a dissolute son. (My younger sister, a pharmaceutical chemist at Sheffield University, has done a little better at cleaving to the path.) Not true and not fair. They were never less than loving and supple in their accommodation of my occasional efforts to remove myself from the path. Their belief in the path manifested itself more subtly. Any unhappiness, for instance, could be diagnosed as deviation either past or planned. Miserable at school? I needed to treat it as a means to an end, the end being university. Restless and unmotivated at university? Again, its only purpose was as a step leading to the next step – head down, push on. Unable to save a mortgage deposit? Perhaps I should consider getting a more solid, more proper job – or moving back to Two Hours Away (by the faster train), the southern provincial city in which I was born. Love life problematic? Perhaps a Proper Job would yield more suitable candidates. None of this advice was delivered with self-righteousness or coercion, it was all meant honestly and kindly. And who could blame them for their belief in a system that had served them perfectly?
But just as the Correct Route Through Life had supplied its own built-in justifications, its completion had robbed it of purpose. My parents had spent their whole lives working dutifully, rewarded daily with the certitude that they were doing the right thing. The arrival of the real reward – comfortable retirement, two decent pensions, mortgage paid off, children through university and out of the house – had deprived them of the satisfaction of dogged, stately progress.
They went a little crazy.
When I was growing up, I never saw my parents argue. They disagreed at times, or frowned at each other, but never did they engage in that basic ritual of relationships, the big argument. Not in my sight, anyway. I have no inkling of what script discussions or creative disputes went on behind the scenes of their performance as Mum and Dad. But on stage, they were pros.
In the first year after their retirement, they argued: long, flamboyant arguments with epic scope, stirring chiaroscuro and elaborate, intertwined plots and subplots. Late in life, they found that they shared a gift for holding a really poisonous row.
They supplied their own reviews of these arguments. Ever since I turned eighteen, Dad had routinely taken me out for ‘a pint’ at the local pub. A pint, precisely: two half-pints of bitter, followed by a further two ordered with hints of wicked indulgence and declamations that that had never been the plan. After his retirement, those drinks turned into discussions of the arguments. ‘Your mum and I have been arguing a lot,’ he would say, every time, as if he didn’t say the same thing every time. He never criticised her, and I truly believe that it would never even occur to him to do so. But he would sadly acknowledge the fact of the arguments, without giving the slightest detail as to what might be causing them, and expect me to be sympathetic.
(My sister reported that she was getting the exact same from Mum, often at precisely the same moment. Mum did criticise Dad, but only in the vaguest, most all-encompassing terms: ‘Your Father!’, uttered as if his very existence was an affront we had all quietly tolerated for too long.)
Then, a transformation. After about a year of arguments, including the hellish Christmas of 2012, my parents decided they needed a holiday. For twenty-five years, French beaches had known their presence in the summer. Their knowledge of the French coast was probably rival to that of Allied high command, June 1944. But this time, in the spring of 2013, they went on a city break, to Brussels on the Eurostar.
They stayed four nights and I received three postcards. Dad ate a horse steak. Mum ate a waffle sold from a van. They were photographed in front of the Atomium, the Palais de Justice, the Tintin Museum, the restaurant where Dad ate the steak, the van from which Mum purchased the waffle, and the headquarters of the European Commission.
A mania took hold. An addiction, maybe. No city in Europe was safe. It didn’t really matter where this postcard came from, and I already knew the gist of what was written on the back. It would join a small pile of very similar postcards on the kitchen counter, next to a cork board thoroughly covered with a bright collage of classical columns, Gothic spires, Moorish palaces, Dutch gables and high pitched Nordic roofs.
The era of arguments came to an end. So began the era of city breaks.
Standing in the icy doorway for so long had completely thrown me off my stride. I opened another can of Stella, forgetting that I already had one on the go.
All the cans in the fridge were empty by the time I left the house, and so were the half-empty cans I had found. I would have to pick up more, but then I would have needed to make a run in any case. Three cans or fewer was completely insufficient, dangerous. The horrible thought that there was no alcohol in the flat would be at or near the front of my mind all day.
In other regards the morning was going well. I had showered, put on (mostly) clean clothes, and set out at a reasonable time. My bag was double-checked for all the things I needed: two digital voice recorders, my old one and my new one, and spare batteries for them. After the recent disaster with F.A.Q., I was taking no chances.
Also in the bag were Pierce’s books: two novels, the mugging book, and the cash-in collection of non-fiction that his publisher had put out the Christmas that the mugging book was at the top of every broadsheet ‘books of the year’ list. Actors, MPs, television historians, baking competition hosts, they all exerted themselves to overstate how luminous, powerful, searing, important, draining, life-affirming, etcetera, etcetera they had found Night Traffic. I felt quite resentful about all this, because I had been reading Pierce for years. My copy of Night Traffic was the softback Panhandler Press edition with the cheap cover art, not the classy Faber edition that appeared when the award shortlists and reviews started to pile up, and which is still inescapable on the Tube.
I had been reading Pierce since his first novel, Mile End Road, came out in 2009. This was a fairly conventional story of twenty-somethings finding love, losing it, finding it again and then losing it for a second and final time. But the few reviews it received praised its rendering of twenty-first-century London life and its (at the time) unusually realistic depiction of the mobile phone and social media habits of young Londoners. It was longlisted for a couple of prizes and did not trouble any bestseller charts.
Pierce’s second novel, Murder Boards, had the good fortune to appear just before the 2011 riots. To capitalise, the post-riot paperback was given a sensational cover, with a movie-like strapline: THE CITY IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE. This bore little relation to its contents, 500 pages of non-linear narrative and cut-up technique told from the multiple viewpoints of its spectral cast of characters. It was concerned – obsessed, really – with missing persons and unresolved crimes, and steeped in police jargon and the imagery and phrasing of TV news. At times, it appeared to be deliberately opaque and confusing, as if the reader were an investigator confronted with contradictory accounts of events and inscrutable enmity between characters, between reader and author, between author and reality, with the objective truth of the past unknowable. To