20
The Curse of St. Giles
The pub door fell open at Paul’s touch and he stumbled across the threshold into the smoke filled bar room. The place was packed and it was with some difficulty that he manoeuvred himself through the crowd.
He was being pursued by a gang of vagrants and he prayed to God that they hadn’t followed him inside. There was a bouncer on the door – surely he wouldn’t let them in, dressed as they were. Maybe they wouldn’t even try to enter but would wait on the street corner for him to come out. Well, if that was their game they would have a long wait! He ordered himself a pint of strong stout and lit up a cigarette.
“I thought smoking was banned.” He said to the barman.
“Anything goes here, mate.”
Paul nodded and looked around him at the dark and smoky saloon. He’d often passed this pub but had never thought to enter it. This was The Crown at Seven Dials. He happened to know that this was the last of seven pubs that had once stood at this intersection. There were seven roads leading away from the Dials in seven different directions and at one time there had been a different pub at the corner of each one of them.
He took a long drink of his beer, a hard pull on his cigarette and exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. They hadn’t followed him in then, thank Christ! He could relax and take some time to recover from what had been a very nasty and unsettling experience.
He had been walking the streets. Paul was a Dérive, a drifter. He wandered London’s streets listening for the psycho-geographical articulation of the city. As he walked, he concentrated his awareness on the effects of the environment on his emotions and behaviour. He was an intellectual and an artist and he believed that the results of his experiment, when transformed into art, would be a boon to mankind.
Some time earlier he had been walking along St Giles High Street by the front of the church when he had noticed a prostitute’s calling card in a vandalised phone box by the church yard entrance. There was a line drawing on the card of a female figure dressed in a bustier and stockings and he had felt a strong compulsion to take a closer look at the crude sex ad. This was a socio-sexual icon, an important symbol of the depraved underworld that existed just below the city’s veneer of respectability. On closer inspection he saw that the drawing, which he had first assumed was of a woman, was, in fact, of a human figure of indeterminate gender; the upper half of the figure had breasts, the lower half sported an erect penis. He studied the card intently for some minutes. There was something mysterious about it. For one thing there was no phone number on it. So how was one supposed to make contact? Assuming, of course that anyone would be depraved enough to want to pay to have sex with this… monstrosity… but as he turned away he realised, to his horror, that he had become aroused.
“I know where she lives. I can take you round there.”
The words had been spoken by a street creature, a dirty, ragged tramp with broken shoes and matted hair.
“Come on now, you know you want to.”
Paul had not replied. He had walked briskly away from the vagrant in the direction of Holborn. He had had problems with these street people before. The best policy was to ignore them completely.
“Do you want pre op or post op, Mister?”
“He wants pre-op! He needs a cock up his arse!”
Damn it, there were two of them. The second one was even dirtier and more ragged than the first and he had a vicious snarl on his lips. Paul quickened his step and turned off the main thoroughfare to the right. He had a vague notion of heading for the thick crowds of Covent Garden; they would surely find it harder to harass him there, surrounded by a multitude of shoppers and tourists. But as he turned the corner another vagrant faced him. It was a woman this time, although she was barely recognisable as such. She was wearing an ensemble that seemed to be woven from old sacks and black bin liners. She stood right in front of him, as if she had known precisely when he was about to turn the corner.
She said, “It’s you again, is it? You just can’t stay away, can you?”
“Know him, do you?” The first tramp asked.
“Oh Yes! He’s quite the regular. He hangs around the Molly Houses smoking crack with the trannies!”
Puzzled by this groundless accusation he paused for a moment with the notion of denying it but realised what a pointless exercise that would be. She had perhaps seen him on his wanderings and mistaken his intellectual musings for the deranged wanderings of a sex and drug addict. Whatever the explanation there was clearly no point in trying to explain the nature of his psycogeographical experiment to her or the other members of this band of street dwellers so he ignored her and tried to walk past.
“Who’d you think you’re pushing?”
She stood squarely in his path and when he was almost past her grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back. The other two grabbed him as well and the sensation of their grubby fingers all over him was too much for him. He jerked himself away from them and stepped into the road to try to escape their clutches. A black cab was forced to swerve to avoid him and its driver cursed and gave a blast on his horn.
He managed to extricate himself and was off without a backward glance, adrenalin surging through his veins. He heard their voices behind him but carried on walking. He propelled himself in a straight line as rapidly as he could until he was carried directly to the door of The Crown which seemed to invite him in and to offer him sanctuary.
It had been a nasty scene and he was shaken by it but he soon managed to get the incident into perspective. Had he been in any real danger? Probably not and he was safe now - if they were still there when he went out he would quite simply re-enter the pub and call the police.
He looked around him. It was dark in here and so smoky that the faces of the customers seemed hazy and distorted. Their bodies swarmed around the room in a confusion of shape and colour. The hollow buzz of conversation rose and fell in cadence and volume but he could understand nothing of what was being said around him. He was not even sure that it was English that was being spoken. Something seemed to be happening to camouflage and contort the words and sentences as soon as they left the throats of those who uttered them, leaving him with the sense of being in a miasmic stew of blurred shapes and meaningless noises. But then, one face in particular materialised before him, one that captured his attention so fully that he entirely forgot that there were any other people in the room at all.
She was dark haired and pale faced with deep red lips and bright green eyes and she was sitting on a bar stool with her back to the wall.
He moved nearer to her and noticed she was with someone, a big, black haired someone who seemed to be a little bit drunk. She was talking and he was staring into his beer, as if concentrating intently on what was being said. Occasionally he nodded and made noises of agreement.
“You see, the streets have a memory, Mick. They remember everything that’s happened. The energy that’s produced in a particular urban space is a result of what’s happened there. Certain people are sensitive to this energy and if they concentrate they can re-capture a sense of what’s gone on… and right where we are now the famous Rookery once stood, a terrible slum where poor people had to live ten or twenty to a room. When I walk the streets around here I can feel their pain, their misery”
She was French! A sexy French girl of no more that twenty five years of age, and she was smart, maybe even an intellectual like him and she was talking about his passion, psycho-geography! How rare it was to encounter a woman who shared his unusual obsession. Nine times out of ten, when he tried to discuss this subject with girls they would give him a blank look and change the subject. Oh how he wanted her! If more women were like her he wouldn’t have such problems finding a girlfriend. How he yearned for a woman who shared his passion to drift, a fellow traveller, a soul mate to wander the streets with. He suddenly realised how lonely he was. If only he could persuade her to accompany him on his wanderings. He had to try to get to know her! He took a deep breath and managed to summon up the courage to speak.
“Are… are you a Dérive?” He asked her.
She stopped talking and fixed her cool, green eyes on him.
“What do you know about Les Dérives?” She asked, but then her large companion looked up from his beer.
“Who the fuck are you?” He snarled in a thick Irish accent and for a second it seemed likely that he would throw a punch with one of his great ham sized fists.
“Mick! Arret! Stop it! This is fascinant! What do you know about les dérives?”
“Sorry to intrude,” Paul said, “it’s just that I’m terribly interested in psycho geography and urban landscapes. I’m Paul, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Paul, by the way. I’m Natalie and this is Mick. So who have you read?”
“Well, Guy Debord, of course, and people like Sinclair and Ackroyd.”
“And you are a Dérive?”
He just adored the way she said it. He felt inspired. Before he could stop himself he was quoting Debord at her, a passage that he had learned by heart, one that seemed to him to encapsulate all the glamour and mystery of the strange science in which they both shared an interest.
“‘…the sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground; the appealing or repelling character of certain places…’”