London is a roar, a slow explosion, scattering every living and dead thing and never letting them rest. Every corner hums, or echoes with a hum, which both repels and attracts. Even the colours and smells seem to roar. Even in the seemingly serene corners of green-grey Hackney parks, with their steel-trap ornate fences, this savage sound reverberates. The City is drowned, infected by the ooze of its energy, and out east along the waterways, Docklands and Limehouse, with their fake Venetian-Lido-style living, are stained by the intensity of sound. And further and further outward to New Cross, Shepherd’s Bush, Kilburn, Kensal Rise, with its black faces and ghost-white youth leading pig-eyed surly dogs, all humming, all electrified by a single slow shout.
In a poky two-room flat not far from Islington, the ripples of the roar still resound. Here the middle class has found a cosy corner, and a young woman called Iona Kirkpatrick has made herself a home, if only temporarily.
Iona is jet-black-haired and blue-eyed. As another London day is breaking she is getting up from her bed. She places two bare feet on her wooden floor. Naked, she puts on her black bra. Moving towards the window, she opens it, lets out last night’s stale air. She takes a deep breath, tracking the skid of an aeroplane in the morning sky.
Behind her in the background gloom of her flat, a nameless man finishes dressing, putting on his shirt and trousers. He gazes at Iona’s bare back, her boyish bottom, her bony and compact features. He betrays a certain awkwardness. Iona doesn’t ask him to stay for breakfast, or make the simple offer of a morning coffee. Since they woke up she has offered him nothing. Yet last night she had been so receptive, the way she had opened her body for him.
“Shall we have a coffee together somewhere?” he asks, and then leaves the sentence hanging, as if he were going to say more, but doesn’t.
“No.” Iona shakes her head, not turning to look at him. “Too much to do.”
Watching her slip into the black silk panties, he remembers how he had pulled them off last night as she stood by her desk. Like a soldier surrendering, she had raised both arms above her head as he undressed her. She had been submissive. But now she is cold. As she puts on her pyjama top, she doesn’t look at him at all.
“So, you know where you are,” she says, polite but distant. “I don’t need to come down with you, do I?” She buttons up her pyjama top but leaves her legs bare.
“I’ll be fine,” he answers. A pause. “When can we see each other again?”
She turns to him now, refusal in her eyes. She shrugs her shoulders in a gentle gesture of “no.”
The nameless man kisses her goodbye and leaves. She hears the soft press of his feet on the carpet grow steadily fainter until the door shuts behind him.
Up above the morning traffic Iona stands by the window, watching him disappear into the throng of the cobbled street. The scent of sex still lingers in the room, and seems to surprise her. It’s on the sheets, and on her body. She sees a scattering of hairs on the pillow, and an odour, not hers, leaves a cloying warmth in the bed. She strips off the sheets and stuffs the knotted mass into the washing machine. In less than an hour, she says to herself, she won’t remember his smell. And before long the recollection of his face will also have been washed from her memory.
In the bathroom she removes her pyjama top and underwear. Standing under the shower head, she lets the water pour down on her hair. A familiar sense of relief floods over her. The lust and dirt of last night, staining her pale skin, are rinsed off and washed down the drain, mingling with other waste, to begin their journey through London’s numberless sewers and then ultimately out into the muddy Thames.