1
Love falls from the summer sky.
* * *
It is twenty-three minutes past twenty-two and London burns. Flames roar from the shattered windows of a Brixton Foot Locker. White skeletons of torched Citroëns and Toyotas lie broken along Wood Green Lane. In Enfield a barricade of blazing wheelie bins defies police and riot-dogs. The Turks of Turnpike Lanes, baseball bats ready, form a phalanx between their shops, their cafés, their livelihoods and the voiceless roar of street-rage. Jagged teeth of bottle-smash, car-crash windscreen-sugar, bashed-in shutters. Scattered shoe boxes and a single flat-screen television, dropped on its back, face shattered by a fleeing foot. Waltham Forest to Croydon, Woolwich to Shepherd’s Bush, riot runs like molten lead from BlackBerry to iPhone, Nokia to Samsung, flows down into the heart of the city, to Islington, Sloane Square, Oxford Circus.
‘What are you doing here?’ the woman in the TfL vest asks the young man stepping from the train. White, wide-eyed, a coxcomb of red hair flopping into his eyes. Tweeds two sizes too small, brogues, a leather bag slung across a narrow shoulder. A thin, unworldly thing caught out of time and space: a fawn in a foundry. She and this fey boy are the only people on the Central eastbound platform.
‘I’m trying to find Meard Mews?’
‘Meard Mews?’
‘Yes. It’s around Broadwick Street somewhere. I think.’
‘Are you out of your head?’
‘I am at Oxford Circus?’
‘Did you hear what they said? Avoid inessential travel?’ The woman in the hi-viz holds up her BlackBerry. ‘It’s kicking off up there.’
Subterranean winds whip shoe-dust, rattle chocolate wrappers across the tiles and carry the rumble from the street, at times voices, at times a soft, surging roar. Crashes. Splinterings. The sounds swirl through the tubes of the colossal instrument that is Oxford Circus station and the young man looks up, antelope eyes wide.
‘Can you help me?’
‘Exit 7,’ the woman says. ‘Please be safe up there.’
‘I have a charmed life,’ he calls back up the platform.
He emerges into riot. Hands shy rocks, bricks, pieces of smashed litter bin and bus-timetable off the shutters of Nike’s flagship store. Every hit on the swoosh raises cheers. He ought to slip behind them into the narrow ways of Soho but the sight, the sound, the smell of anarchy are so contrary to everything he understands about the city that he lingers a fascination too long. Mob radar registers him. Mob turns. Mob sees him. Pale, tweeded. A bag over his shoulder. Effete. Elite.
His hand goes to the leather satchel, soft as kisses from age and love. The same satchel once accompanied his great-uncle Auberon as he pursued sensitive misdemeanours in Lycia and the Dodecanese. These men can take it from him. These men can do whatever they want. Flesh is so much more satisfying to rattle rocks from than clattery steel. Flesh can cry and bleed. Four men break from the group and move towards him, shards of street furniture in hands. He backs away. Glass cracks under the heels of his brogues. He stands in a shard-crop field of smashed bottles, car-window sugar, shop glazing.
The sky beats with sudden noise. A television news helicopter comes in low and hard over the roof of Debenham’s. The swivel camera hangs like a testicle from the helicopter’s thorax. It turns above Oxford Circus, seeking newsworthy shots. Mob looks up, poses: its CNN moment.
He spins on broken splinters and vanishes into Soho.
The narrow, tight streets open onto a parallel world. Soho ignores helicopters, breaking glass, rattling shutters, jeering voices, the fact that this is the year 2011. Soho life moves as it ever has, shoaling in sushi restaurants. Chinese buffets, coffeehouses, corner bars. Lads in plaid shorts and Havaianas stand loud-drinking on the pavements. Young women smoke in cut-offs and summer shoes. Televisions play live rolling feed of the riots. Amy Winehouse sings how love is a losing game.
He pauses to consult his phone. Google doesn’t know Meard Mews.
‘You want to be careful with that,’ a street drinker calls. ‘Someone’ll have it off you.’
‘I’m trying to find Meard Mews?’
Shrugs. Giggles.
‘Meard Mews?’ The glass collector flickers his fingers over the phone screen. ‘Map doesn’t show it, but it’s there.’ A tap on the glass.
* * *
Meard Mews is a shoulder-wide crevasse between two brick walls, crowded with pungent shadows. He flicks on his phone torch: heaped black refuse sacks, cardboard pulped by rain and feet. Reeks of August rot, garlic, overheated cooking oil. Kitchen chatter. Radio gaga and Soho beer piss. A set of black double doors, the email said. There are three such doors in the narrow passage.
He buzzes the intercom on the first door.
‘Crumble?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘Crumble. It’s, uh, a club.’
‘Fuck off.’
Sirens, amplified by the brick trumpet of Meard Mews. Next door, next intercom.
‘Crumble?’
A long stream of swift syllables in a language he does not recognise ends in a dead intercom. To the final door.
‘Hello, I’m the music.’
‘What love?’
‘The music. For Crumble. I’m playing a set.’
‘Never heard of it love.’
‘It could be small.’
The voice calls someone out of the range of the intercom. ‘Sorry, nothing like Crumble round here love.’
‘This is Meard Mews?’
‘Yes.’
‘I got an email to come to Meard Mews. A black door.’
‘Not here love.’
The news helicopter passes overhead again. He taps up the promoter’s email again.
Then love falls from the summer sky.
Copyright © 2023 by Ian McDonald
