Moorcock, Michael - London Bone

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London Bone - a novelette by Michael Moorcock

London Bone

a novelette by Michael Moorcock

For Ronnie Scott

ONE

My name is Raymond Gold and I'm a well-known dealer. I was born too many

years ago in Upper Street, Islington. Everybody reckons me in the London

markets and I have a good reputation in Manchester and the provinces. I

have bought and sold, been the middleman, an agent, an art representative,

a professional mentor, a tour guide, a spiritual bridge-builder. These

days I call myself a cultural speculator.

But, you won't like it, the more familiar word for my profession, as I

practised it until recently, is scalper. This kind of language is just

another way of isolating the small businessman and making what he does

seem sleazy while the stockbroker dealing in millions is supposed to be

legitimate. But I don't need to convince anyone today that there's no

sodding justice.

'Scalping' is risky. What you do is invest in tickets on spec and hope to

make a timely sale when the market for them hits zenith. Any kind of

ticket, really, but mostly shows. I've never seen anything offensive about

getting the maximum possible profit out of an American matron with more

money than sense who's anxious to report home with the right items ticked

off the beento list. We've all seen them rushing about in their overpriced

limos and mini-buses, pretending to be individuals: Thursday:

Changing-of-the-Guard, Harrods, Planet Hollywood, Royal Academy,

Tea-At-the-Ritz, Cats. It's a sort of tribal dance they all feel compelled

to perform. If they don't perform it, they feel inadequate. Saturday:

Tower of London, Bucket of Blood, Jack-the-Ripper talk, Sherlock Holmes

Pub, Sherlock Holmes tour, Madame Tussaud's, Covent Garden Cream Tea,

Dogs. These are people so traumatized by contact with strangers that their

only security lies in these rituals, these well-blazed trails and familiar

chants. It's my job to smooth their paths, to make them exclaim how pretty

and wonderful and elegant and magical it all is. The street people aren't

a problem. They're just so many charming Dick Van Dykes.

Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves.

They've become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home

that they can't survive without it. It's your duty to help them get their

regular fixes while they travel. And when they make it back after three

weeks on alien shores, their friends, of course, are always glad of some

foreign bullshit for a change.

Even if you sell a show ticket to a real enthusiast, who has already been

forty nine times and is so familiar to the cast they see him in the street

and think he's a relative, who are you hurting? Andros Loud Website, Lady

Hatchet's loyal laureate, who achieved rank and wealth by celebrating the

lighter side of the moral vacuum? He would surely applaud my enterprise in

the buccaneering spirit of the free market. Venture capitalism at its

bravest. Well, he'd applaud me if he had time these days from his railings

against fate, his horrible understanding of the true nature of his coming

obscurity. But that's partly what my story's about.

I have to say in my own favour that I'm not merely a speculator or, if you

like, exploiter. I'm also a patron. For many years, not just recently, a

niagara of dosh has flowed out of my pocket and into the real arts faster

than a cat up a Frenchman. Whole orchestras and famous soloists have been

brought to the Wigmore Hall on the money they get from me. But I couldn't

have afforded this if it wasn't for the definitely iffy Miss Saigon (a

triumph of well-oiled machinery over dodgy morality) or the unbelievably

decrepit Good Rockin' Tonite (in which the living dead jive in the

aisles), nor, of course, that first great theatrical triumph of the new

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millennium, Schindler: The Musical. Make 'em weep, Uncle Walt!

So who is helping most to support the arts? You, me, the lottery?

I had another reputation, of course, which some saw as a second

profession. I was one of the last great London characters. I was always on

late-night telly lit from below and Iain Sinclair couldn't write a

paragraph without dropping my name at least once. I'm a quintessential

Londoner, I am. I'm a Cockney gentleman.

I read Israel Zangwill and Gerald Kersh and Alexander Barron. I can tell

you the best books of Pett Ridge and Arthur Morrison. I know Pratface

Charlie, Driff and Martin Stone, Bernie Michaud and the even more

legendary Gerry and Pat Goldstein. They're all historians, archeologists,

revenants. There isn't another culture-dealer in London, oldster or child,

who doesn't at some time come to me for an opinion. Even now, when I'm as

popular as a pig at a Putney wedding and people hold their noses and dive

into traffic rather than have to say hello to me, they still need me for

that.

I've known all the famous Londoners or known someone else who did. I can

tell stories of long-dead gangsters who made the Krays seem like Amnesty

International. Bare-knuckle boxing. Fighting the fascists in the East End.

Gun-battles with the police all over Stepney in the 1900s. The terrifying

girl gangsters of Whitechapel. Barricading the Old Bill in his own

barracks down in Notting Dale.

I can tell you where all the music halls were and what was sung in them.

And why. I can tell Marie Lloyd stories and Max Miller stories that are

fresh and sharp and bawdy as the day they happened, because their wit and

experience came out of the market streets of London. The same streets. The

same markets. The same family names. London is markets. Markets are

London.

I'm a Londoner through and through. I know Mr Gog personally. I know Ma

Gog even more personally. During the day I can walk anywhere from Bow to

Bayswater faster than any taxi. I love the markets. Brick Lane. Church

Street. Portobello. You won't find me on a bike with my bum in the air on

a winter's afternoon. I walk or drive. Nothing in between. I wear a

camel-hair in winter and a Barraclough's in summer. You know what would

happen to a coat like that on a bike.

I love the theatre. I like modern dance, very good movies and ambitious

international contemporary music. I like poetry, prose, painting and the

decorative arts. I like the lot, the very best that London's got, the

whole bloody casserole. I gobble it all up and bang on my bowl for more.

Let timid greenbelters creep in at weekends and sink themselves in the

West End's familiar deodorised shit if they want to. That's not my city.

That's a tourist set. It's what I live off. What all of us show-people

live off. It's the old, familiar circus. The big rotate.

We're selling what everybody recognises. What makes them feel safe and

certain and sure of every single moment in the city. Nothing to worry

about in jolly old London. We sell charm and colour by the yard. Whole

word factories turn out new rhyming slang and saucy street characters are

trained on council grants. Don't frighten the horses. Licensed pearlies

pause for a photo-opportunity in the dockside Secure Zones. Without all

that cheap scenery, without our myths and magical skills, without our

whorish good cheer and instincts for trade -- any kind of trade -- we

probably wouldn't have a living city.

As it is, the real city I live in has per square inch more creative energy

at work at any given moment than anywhere else on the planet. But you'd

never know it from a stroll up the Strand. It's almost all in those lively

little sidestreets the English-speaking tourists can't help feeling a bit

nervous about and which the French adore.

If you use music for comfortable escape you'd probably find more

satisfying and cheaper relief in a massage parlour than at the umpteenth

revival of The Sound of Music. I'd tell that to any hesitant punter who's

not too sure. Check out the phone boxes for the ladies, I'd say, or you

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Moorcock, Michael - London Bone

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