fiction / London / 1993
22 May 1994
On the morning Martin Vale decided not to jump, Blackfriars Bridge was crowded with people who had no idea they were participating in his decision. Their ignorance annoyed him. He had expected the city to arrange itself more ceremonially around the crisis.
He had chosen ten past nine because he imagined offices beginning without him, telephones ringing on desks, someone saying, "Has anyone seen Martin?" with the faint irritation reserved for unreliable stationery. He had not imagined a delivery van reversing nearby while emitting a noise like a dying goose.
Rain came sideways off the river and made clerks, couriers, tourists, and barristers duck into their collars. A woman in a red scarf swore at a taxi. Two boys in school blazers argued about a footballer. A man selling newspapers held the front page against his chest as if protecting bad news from the weather.
London had refused atmosphere and supplied logistics. Buses sighed. Shoes slapped. Umbrellas turned themselves inside out and were cursed back into shape. A cyclist shouted something doctrinal at a cab driver. The cab driver replied with a gesture that required no translation.
Martin stood at the parapet with both hands on the stone and discovered, to his embarrassment, that despair had not made him original. The river was brown. The bridge was indifferent. His shoes leaked.
He had dressed badly for the occasion. The good coat was at the cleaner's, the black tie seemed melodramatic even at breakfast, and his left sock had slipped under the heel. It is difficult to maintain tragic authority while adjusting one's sock inside a wet shoe.
In his pocket was a rejection letter folded into eight sharp parts. The editor had found much to admire. Martin had begun to hate admiration. It was the velvet glove over the fist, the kiss on the blade, the little hymn sung before the trapdoor opened.
The manuscript in question was called The City Without Mercy, a title he now recognised as both inaccurate and pushy. The city had plenty of mercy. It simply distributed it at random and in units too small to live on.
Much to admire, the letter said. The pacing is assured. The atmosphere is vivid. Unfortunately, we are unable to place it on our list. Martin had underlined "unable" three times, as if disability in the publishing trade might qualify him for compassion.
A woman beside him said, "If you are going to drop that, don't. The tide will only bring it back uglier." She was looking at the letter, not at him. She had an umbrella with two broken ribs and the dry, level voice of a person who had already lost patience with drama.
"I beg your pardon," Martin said, because even ruin had not relieved him of manners.
"The letter," she said. "People are always throwing paper off bridges. Declarations, bills, poems, one divorce petition last March. It comes back. Paper is spiteful."
"It is only paper," Martin said.
"Nothing is only paper in London."
She said her name was Nell when he failed to ask. She worked in an office that insured ships, though she had never been on one and distrusted the sea. She crossed the bridge every morning and had developed, she said, an eye for men rehearsing grand gestures in unsuitable footwear.
"I'm not rehearsing," Martin said.
"No, you have the look of someone hoping for an audience and resenting the audience provided."
This was so accurate he briefly disliked her more than death.
He laughed then, unwillingly, which ruined the morning's architecture. The woman took the letter, opened it without permission, read the first line, and made a face.
"Much to admire," she said. "Cowards."
"You don't know that."
"I know sentences designed to avoid blood."
She handed the letter back but kept hold of one corner until he looked at her. "Have breakfast."
"I've had breakfast."
"Have another. It is harder to be final after eggs."
The cafe near the station had steamed windows and a waitress who addressed every man as love with identical contempt. Nell ordered coffee she did not drink, toast she ate from the middle outward, and bacon with the practical air of a person assembling evidence for living.
Martin ordered coffee. It arrived grey. He drank it because punishment was apparently the theme.
"What's the book about?" Nell asked.
"A clerk who discovers the city is conspiring against him."
"Is it?"
"What?"
"The city."
Martin looked at the window. Outside, a man in a bowler hat stepped neatly around a puddle and directly into a second, larger puddle. Nell saw it too and smiled without showing teeth.
"No," Martin said. "Not conspiring. Busy."
"That sounds better."
He hated that it did.
By eleven, the rejection letter had a ring of coffee on it and three new sentences written in the margin. Nell had crossed out the title and suggested The Clerk Who Mistook Weather for Judgement. Martin said that was not a title. Nell said it was at least an honest diagnosis.
They walked north together through the rain, not because anything had been saved, but because the city had offered the next pavement and Martin, lacking a better plan, stepped onto it.
At Ludgate Hill she turned toward her office. "Tomorrow," she said, "if you must stand on a bridge, stand in the middle. The views are better and people can pass on both sides."
Martin asked whether she always gave instructions to strangers.
"Only the badly written ones."
He watched her disappear under a black umbrella that had survived the morning through spite alone. Then he unfolded the rejection letter, smoothed it against a wall, and wrote at the top: The city was not cruel. It was occupied.
It was not a good first line yet. It was, however, a line. Martin put it in his pocket and went to buy dry socks.