Lost in North Islington

(Note: This was written a decade ago. I just rediscovered it on an old CD-Rom of my unpublished fiction--D.W.)


The last night I was in London, I started loving the place. Why does it always have to be this way? If London were a woman, we would have had a great one-night stand. As it was, let’s just say we briefly enjoyed each other’s company, leaving everything else to the imagination.

A good and true traveler would have heaved his normal identity aside, transforming himself into an explorer. He would have presented a clean slate, open to the stimulations of the new place. He would study the guide books. He would call up friends of friends.

If he’s halfway lucky, he comes home speaking with an accent.

Of course, new places make new demands. We’re not all up to that, at least not every time. Certainly not me, not this time. Because I arrived in a deep funk, and not even London could rouse me from it.

Starting at Heathrow, therefore, I pretended I wasn’t here. This was a tested strategy of mine – since I wasn’t really here, then I didn’t have to be depressed and lonely.

I bought a ticket from a machine at the airport and took the train into Paddington Station, just like the teddy bear. It was early morning. At the train station, I hailed one of those big old fancy black London taxis.

The drivers are insufferably polite. Their vehicles are like old-fashioned tin cans, i.e., the non-crushable type. They are heavy, though hardly like a Volga in Moscow. The drivers get you to where you are going, regardless of whether it’s on the map, and they hand you off to the care of a desk clerk personally.

I love English women. Especially their accents. And also how they have to screw up their faces into all kinds of gymnastic holds just to get their meanings out. So, I decided I was in a kind of heaven here in London just because I would get to listen to the women talk.

A few nights into my visit, which can best be characterized as a miserably ill-timed, wasted week lacking any semblance of utility, I had already tasted all the ports and warm beers London has to offer the casual visitor, and I was getting mighty sick of my dormitory-like accommodations.

Dormitory, you say? Listen, London is like a Third World country, once you get out of the five-star tourist district, and I was way out from there, stuck in North Islington, which supposedly is a happening place whenever the Labor Party is in power, but not necessarily for a guy down on his luck without any local connections.

Still, even in the midst of my indescribable misery, there were English all around -- the men, with their cheery awkwardness, and the women with their clear resonance and singsong sentences, softening me as I bought the mundane goods of any traveler -- phone cards, postage stamps, alcohol, a coffee, some digestibles, the random cup of tea.

They all smiled shyly as well, if crookedly in some cases, as they worked themselves up trying to achieve just the right expression to react to this oddly accessible creature before them, this visitor from another reality altogether.

The desk clerk in my dorm, for example, whom I often visited to buy another minimum-level phone card to place calls back to my supposed homeland, has a lovely way of enunciating “So it’s the two-pound card again, sir, is it?” I love the way she says that, so of course I never buy more than the bare minimum. She is, after all, my main contact with anyone outside of the voices pounding inside my own head during this horrible week in what otherwise is no doubt an urban paradise.

Now, at some point in my self-imposed discomfiture, some real work had to set in. I remembered to pretend to give a speech to a bunch of Englishmen, no less -- a daunting prospect. I tore myself away from the phone-card lady and made up some bullshit about what was going on in my chosen industry back home.

The English listened attentively (I like that about them), so I made a quick getaway before they could warm up enough to ask their invariably obnoxious questions. What they lack in directness they make up for with a vengeance in verbal acuity once they trap you in a bloody dialogue.

I was in no mood for that.

Being ever so wily, I decided to eschew all further work and set off with my tattered tourist map through the tangled streets of London. I almost got flattened about seventy times by those vengeful English drivers whizzing mere centimeters -- centimeters I tell you! -- from the “rise” or whatever the hell they call that pathetic excuse for a curb on the edge of their interminable roads. These people should learn to interrupt foreigners during speeches rather than run them down like rabbits on the tarmac.

Luckily, at this point, I remembered the one good reason to be walking all over the place with such resoluteness. I was there, I remembered somewhat unsteadily, on behalf of my son. The poor boy, survivor of my broken marriage, has always liked leaden soldiers, those wonderfully red-painted figures, with guns and hats that Robert Louis Stevenson arranged on his bedcovers into the Land of Counterpane. Once I drove my boy all the way through northern Michigan to the Canadian border in seek of same, only to meet with disappointment: “Sorry. We could order you some, then, eh?”

Idiots.

The leaden soldiers have become politically incorrect where I come from, with lead causing irreversible brain damage and all, but God Save the Queen, I’m sure I can find them here in good old London.

I am like a heat-seeking missile when it comes to finding something my dear son wants; ignoring the fact that he’s grown and adult now, long past the point of playing with soldiers. There’s no stopping me, a skilled shopper, a mercenary who knows how to penetrate the local culture seamlessly and emerge unscathed, prize in hand.

This, then, actually, is the story of how I found some of those antique leaden soldiers Stevenson wrote about well before they were antiques. It turns out that that miserably upscale neighborhood near my dormitory, the aforementioned North Islington, has a Saturday morning antiques fair.

Yes! Sort of like a street fair, only the merchants are these craggy old people with crooked faces right out of a Dickens novel. Or maybe Hugo. I think I have found the Master of the House, and where he is operating these days: The back alleys of North Islington.

Well, crafty shopper that I am, I made my way through these twirling alleys, snapping a romantic photo here and there with my cam, going shop to shop until -- presto! -- I laid my quivering hands on a prized set of truly antique-looking red British leaden soldiers. They had a strangely familiar look to them, in pose and garb, as if maybe my own deep English ancestry was perhaps coming forth, in the form of these charming little figurines, but I dismissed that thought to commence the bartering process.

I bargained long and heartily with the bent and white-haired proprietress of the street stand where these figures had been lying, unclaimed, for years if not decades, settling finally on the original price she had set, and walked away guardedly, my treasures cloaked in a cheap filmy sheathe only the English could pass off as wrapping paper.

That night was to be my last in London. A couple other Americans from the conference showed up at my dormitory room uninvited, just as I was about to buy another phone card from the front desk clerk, and invited me out to the nearest pub -- apparently for old times sake.

I carefully concealed my soldier treasures inside that ridiculous wrapper, under a book, inside my trashcan, and went off with my dear new colleagues to the pub. Once there, we drank ourselves silly. After all, it was out last night together, and though we’d just met, there’s something special about the prospect of separating from new friends such as these. With any luck you'll never see each other again; but if you do, you'll have this special memory to rediscover.

I studied my colleagues for signs of sentience. The hefty one, from someplace in the Midwest, was truly having a life experience here in North Islington. Turns out he’d never been out of the States, not even out of the Midwest. He liked beer a lot, and he’d had enough in London to be prepared to deliver to all of his relatives and friends a decidedly prosaic trip report.

My other drinking pal reminded me of my younger self. He was thin, dark and brooding. Sophisticated, a world traveler, he knew we were just three castaways, alone for a moment, in a place and a time that would never return. While he was contemplating that, I suddenly noticed (about 3 beers in) how many really cute women there actually were here in lovely North Islington.

For example, those two Japanese girls, drinking and laughing and flirting nervously with some rugby types who had just showed up. Or, a table of English girls, one tall and slender, dark-haired and lovely, straight across in my line of sight on the patio of the perfectly wonderful outside patio of the pub where we were all happily congregating.

At moments like this, time slows. We are serene, in the proper space at the proper time. My colleagues are babbling on, the first about the Midwest and its comforting regularity, the other on the darkness of the world overall. I squint over at my second mate. How is it that the weight of the world has found its way to him?

But then, back again, my eyes find the lovely dark-haired girl. Did I mention how much I like English women? With an elegant gesture, she orders another drink, so I buy a round for our table. Drink to drink, we share the evening air, across that crowded patio, she and I. Her voice rises above the others, drifting over to me, as a melody of fragments, note by note.

My drinking buddies are not aware of her, but I am in heaven, nodding to them, whilst observing her all the while, even as her inevitable boyfriend makes his bloody appearance. Slumping against her chair, sharing sloppy toasts with his obviously drunken buddies, he leans on her, with an air of propriety. His hand quickly finds one of her gently rounded breasts. She pretends to ignore this for a moment, then casts his hand away, but soon enough he resumes his confident exploration over her all-too willing body.

Across the patio, I am thoroughly sedated by now, vaguely aware the lights have flashed on and off, and my partners are beginning to rise for retirement to our mutual barracks, the hated dormitory somewhere off to the south. Chairs are being stacked, just out of my peripheral vision, but I am locked on my angel, the dark-haired beauty with a singsong accent.

Her motility-challenged boyfriend, so drunk he is peeing in the “bathroom” just beyond where the pub lights reach, will be back soon. Her eyes are dewy and lit, her posture that of a maid in waiting, happily anticipating that she’ll soon be wrapped in his muscled arms, staggering back somewhere, to an apartment here in North Islington.

I am (generously) quite happy for her.

My pals and I stagger home, too, and bid our final adieus. The fat fellow promises he will eat hamburgers every day for a week when he hits his home ground, and I believe him. My brooding brother, meanwhile, is pondering the meaning of our trip, including all three of our speeches (I’d missed theirs.)

I can only think about those wrapped soldiers for my dear son in my wastebasket in my room.

The next day, floating over Newfoundland, I retrieve the special leaden treasures from my briefcase and run my fingers lovingly over them, anticipating my boy’s delight, even though he is long past the age of caring about silly gifts like these.

My seatmate, a fellow built not unlike my Midwestern pal at the pub, lacks all discretion, and so breaks into my reverie. “Hey, aren’t those the Beefeaters figures -- you know, the guys on the liquor bottles? The ones they give out as promos?”

“Ah,” I murmur deftly, covering up my utter sense of deflation. “But hard to find in this condition, you know, since they are the pristine original issue. Limited editions. Mint. Straight from the source -- North Islington.”

Shrugging, he turned back to his wrestling magazine.

It really doesn’t matter, I tell myself. That was a really great trip I just had.

I closed my eyes. Maybe I could wrangle another speaking engagement in London, and stay at the same place again. It has a charm of its own, that dorm, especially given the phone-card lady. And probably my pretty angel would be back at that same pub, having dumped that loutish boyfriend by the time I get back there.

Lowly Beefeaters figures perhaps, but I'm holding onto them tightly, and -- with the drone of the massive plane drumming my inner ear -- starting in on a dream of what it would be like to really get lost in London next time around.

-30-