SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (11 page)

Once or
twice a week Clive would visit Transformations to change into a woman, then he
would go out for the afternoon with his friend Ashlee (usually Archie). They
would walk about then go for tea and a bun or maybe for a little drinkie in a
fashionable bar. Being Cicely out for a walk was, Clive imagined, rather like
being a slightly forgotten celebrity, Mel Smith perhaps or Kenneth Branagh.
Most people paid no attention but one in thirty looked once, looked again, saw
something not right, a remark or a thought would come up to the surface by
which time Cicely was past, leaving turned heads, pokes in the ribs, sometimes
aggressive shouts or sniggers in her trail. Being a trannie also resembled
being a minor celebrity in that the glances you got were related in inverse
proportion to the coolness and hipness of the area and. the inhabitants’
resulting indifference to people from off the telly. In Camden Town, where in
the local starship trooper Sainsbury’s there were more pierced than unpierced
shoppers, Mel or Kenneth would go a long time before they got asked for their
autograph unless it was on their Switch card. Ashlee and Cicely could walk for
hours in that neighbourhood untrammelled by any interference.

Cicely
had always really enjoyed their walks, they had been the highpoint of her week
until Ashlee pointed out the cyclists, then she never enjoyed them again. Clive
and Cicely were alike in that they were prone to having things ruined by
pointing out. Years ago Clive had loved to take long drives up the motorway in
his car which was called a Gordon Keeble and was an Italian-styled Sixties
British-made sportscar. Then one day he’d been going to Leeds and he took his
friend Leonard with him. After a bit Leonard asked if he could drive, so they
pulled into Leicester Forest East Services and changed seats. Leonard raced
straight back onto the motorway and was soon doing eighty-five in the inside
lane, ahead of them in the distance a small hatchback was travelling at about
seventy in the middle lane. Rather than swing across two lanes to overtake,
Leonard got right up behind the Vauxhall Astra and started flashing his
headlights. Clive was a very conscientious driver, he believed in keeping a
safe, two seconds’ distance between vehicles; he achieved this by watching the
car in front pass an object — a sign or a bridge — and then saying to himself ‘only
a fool breaks the two second rule’. If he could complete this sentence before he
passed the same object then they were a safe distance apart. He tried this with
his Gordon Keeble and the Astra and got as far as ‘only a f—’. After a lot of
flashing, the other car moved over. Leonard passed it then moved back into the
inside lane himself.

‘What
was that all about?’ said Clive.

‘The
middle lane should be solely for overtaking,’ explained Leonard in a pedantic
voice. ‘Cars should travel in the inside lane at all other times. If they don’t
it slows everybody up, as that only leaves one lane for overtaking. Driving in
the middle lane is selfish and thoughtless.’

‘Oh, I
didn’t know that,’ said Clive and he never enjoyed a drive again. From then on
the motorways, instead of being a ribbon of pleasure for Clive, unrolling with
merry welcome, were concrete channels of anger, full of selfish dawdlers
creeping up the middle lane with inflaming insensitivity: each licence-plated
rump sneered at him personally. Like Leonard, Clive would now get behind them
all (and there were thousands once you noticed), blip his lights and if they
didn’t move he’d honk his horn, get closer and blip his lights again. Often the
cars wouldn’t move, either not noticing or refusing to budge. In the month
after his drive with Leonard, Clive had four near crashes, he was shot at once
and had two knife fights on a slip road. In the end Clive sold the Gordon
Keeble for a big loss, the bottom really having dropped out of the classic-car
market, and now, if he ever travelled outside London, he took the train.

So it
was with the cyclists. Cicely and Ashlee were walking up Camden High Street one
day, chummily arm in arm. They were crossing on the Pelican opposite the
Acumedical Chinese healing centre when they were forced to jump back and apart
by a cyclist riding the wrong way down the road.

‘They
make me so mad,’ said Ashlee.

‘Who
do?’ said Cicely with a dizzy sensation in her head as if she were on the edge
of a high diving board; she knew something bad was coming but she couldn’t get
out of its way.

‘Bloody
cyclists, especially round here,’ replied her friend. ‘They’re a fucking
menace. They ride on the pavement, they ride through red lights, they ride
through red lights against the traffic, they ride through red lights against
the traffic on the pavement and worst of all there’s just something so horribly
smug about them, like they’re doing you a favour by making the world a worse
place to be in.’

Instantly
to Cicely Camden High Street was filled with swooping, careening machines and
her heart was filled with hate. She had always thought of the bicycle as a
rather benign machine but now these people she saw zinging about might as well
have been mounted on HI V-infected Rottweilers for all the fear and anger they
contaminated her with. They were very various. There were forgetful women on
folding shopper bikes, black youths talking into mobile phones while riding
no-handed, claimants on wrecks of racing bikes with the drop handlebars turned
upside down so as to make sure their brakes didn’t work, serious mountain
bikers with front suspensions made from impossibly light alloys found only in
crashed asteroids, hip twenty-five-year-olds in big baggy pants twiddling away
on chromed BMX bikes (she couldn’t even begin to figure out what that one was
about) and messengers, messengers, messengers. These pedalling freelance
postmen wore expressions fixed on their faces that said ‘Don’t stop me now,
bastard. Last year’s VAT receipts must get to Chemical Bank ere night falls!
The script rewrite must be on the desk of Tim Bevan at Working Title by
yesterday morning or there’ll be hell to pay! The tickets for the charity ball
must get to Mel Smith right now and no old lady on the zebra crossing will stop
them’, so up in the air she goes, arse over zimmer frame.

In all
his wanderings around Camden Town the only cyclist he saw more than once who
stopped at the traffic lights and pedalled on the road and behaved in a
generally non-malignant way, obeying the law like in the olden days, was the
writer Alan Bennett riding around on his dark green lady’s bike with the wicker
basket out front like something from a film about the Cambridge of F.R. Leavis.

Cicely
tried to keep the thing about the cyclists from Clive but he heard about it
soon enough and his life was ruined too. If anything, it hit Clive harder than
it hit Cicely.

Clive
was even more prone than she was to taking things hard; he was barred from
several 24-hour mini marts and his local Blockbusters Video for arguing about
things and he couldn’t go back to Cheltenham any time soon.

They
had a good job Clive and Cicely. They were bookbinders. Clive had served his
apprenticeship at a venerable firm in Bermondsey. He was amongst the last
intake of working-class kids before that craft became a middle-class, Art
School shut-out. Now he worked from home, surrounded by glue and card and skin
in a council-owned live/work apartment in The Brunswick Centre, Holborn, a bold
1960s experiment in concrete eyesores where a Georgian square used to be. He
made a good enough living, enabling him to buy Cicely the finest in giant lace
panties, by repairing ancient manuscripts, binding lectures and other modern
texts for the nearby British Museum and London University and by doing the
occasional fine art job, binding a limited edition set of etchings in rat skin,
that sort of thing.

On the
days when he didn’t go to Transformations Clive would work all morning then,
like ten thousand other lone craftsmen all around London, painters, sculptors,
makers of modern jewellery, writers on internet matters, he would stop at one o’clock
to have soup and a grilled cheese brown bread sandwich, listen to a politician
being toasted on Radio 4’s
The World At One,
then go for a walk, as
himself. Every day he took the same route, past the drunks bungling round the
DHS emergency payout place in Upper Woburn Place, then the Kosovans washing car
windscreens while their women begged at the corner of Upper Woburn Place and
the Euston Road, after that Eversholt Street past Transformations then more
drunks at the start of Camden High Street. Clive often thought that rather than
being paved with gold the streets of Camden Town were paved with alcoholics,
seeing as so many of them were sprawled on the ground. A surprising number were
foreign, Clive imagined a lot of them were on drunk-exchange schemes from other
countries. One thing he noticed about the drunks was that many of them sported
the most magnificent heads of hair. ‘What a waste,’ thought the almost
completely bald Clive as he passed yet another comatose figure displaying a
splendid mane of luxuriant jet-black tresses. Then one day he heard on Radio 4
while drinking his lunchtime soup that alcohol abuse promoted hair growth and
prevented baldness as it led to the suppression of testosterone production in
males. Clive reckoned he might have given heavy drinking a go if he’d found out
about its tonsorial qualities before most of his hair had gone. He suffered particular
hair problems; because of his dressing Clive couldn’t even grow a strange
little beatnik beard in compensation as many baldies did, seeing as it would
pretty much give the game away on Cicely.

Thirty
minutes’ brisk walking would find him heading west up Delancey Street then
round Regents Park Road to Primrose Hill where he would have a cup of
cappuccino sitting outside one of the many patisseries and coffee bars. Just up
the road from where he had his coffee was the headquarters of a big, successful
record company, so walking up and down on the pavement was a constant parade
of men exactly like Clive, thinning-haired forty-somewhats dressed in clobber
aimed at eighteen-year-olds. Like US mailmen who ‘Neither snow nor rain nor
heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their
appointed rounds’, Clive and his fellow coffee drinkers would stoically huddle
on the outside seats of the cafés of Primrose Hill no matter what the weather.
Inside, the patisseries would be empty even in the middle of a January meteor
storm. Twenty years ago you absolutely couldn’t get an Englishman to sit
outside a gaff. They wouldn’t do it. Even in summer temperatures of ninety-five
degrees, drinkers would barricade themselves inside pubs behind frosted glass,
glazed tiles and mahogany. Now you couldn’t keep the bastards indoors no matter
what.

But
even here in this crescent of chi-chi shops the cyclists were up to their dirty
tricks. Even when he saw one doing nothing wrong, Clive would find himself
thinking ‘Fucking bastard’ before he realised he was riding on the correct side
of the road through a green light, not doing no harm to no one.

Until
the pointing out of the cyclists Clive had managed to force himself to enjoy,
indeed to revel in, the wild drinkers, the dirt, the litter, the terrible
record company tosspots, the whole gritty urban shmeer of north London — but
the cyclists spoilt it all. Everywhere he went they taunted him with their
lawless ways and though he tried there was nothing he could do either to
un-notice them or to find a way to cope with their behaviour. Clive tried
shouting at them as they hurtled towards him at thirty miles an hour on the
sidewalk but one person more or less, shouting in the middle of the street in
Camden Town, at either cyclists or lampposts or imaginary six-foot-high dung
beetles, was neither here nor there and nobody took any notice, least of all
the cyclists.

He
tried remonstrating reasonably with them. One time while he was on a zebra
crossing, traversing Regents Park Road, a girl zipped across it behind him,
clipping him on the ankles as she sped up the pavement. ‘This is a pedestrian
crossing not a bike crossing,’ he said quite mildly. She just looked over her
shoulder at him but, unusually, he caught up with her half a minute later as
she stopped to look at her
A—Z.
It wasn’t often you got one of them
stationary so he went up to her and said, ‘You shouldn’t ride on the pavement
and that, you know. It’s really intimidating for old people and stuff.’

She
just looked up and said, ‘Who died and left you in charge?’ Then rode off, her
behind waggling contemptuously at him. Clive knew then he was going to have to
kill one of them.

At
nights he couldn’t sleep, imagining arguments he’d have with this girl though
even in the self-justifying cavern of his brain he came off worst. She always
had the snappy rejoinder: ‘Who died and left you in charge?’

‘You or
one of your kind,’ was all he could come back with but you could see on her
face that she didn’t believe him. Well, he might not be able to kill a cyclist
but he knew a woman who could.

The
first thing he did was to become a member of The London Cycling Campaign: it
was important to know his enemy. He soon found out that the major cause of
death amongst cyclists was them being crushed under the wheels of trucks. Clive
reckoned it would be going too far to buy himself a truck and get an HGV
licence and so on. However in another whining article about how great they all
were, these pedalling pricks, he read what terrible havoc four-wheel-drive
vehicles, Range Rovers, Toyota Amazons, Mitsubishi Shoguns, were carving
through the pedestrian and cycling population with their big bumpy bumpers.
Their huge flat fronts smacked the unprotected human form with a metal punch of
bone-vaporising ferocity.