The Keys to the Street

1

I
ron spikes surmount each of the gates into the park twenty-seven of them on some, eighteen or eleven on others. For the most part the park itself is surrounded by thorn hedges, but thousands of feet of spiked railings still remain. Some of these spikes are blunted, as on those enclosing the gardens of Gloucester Gate, some are ornamented, and some take a bend in the middle. On the tall railings outside one of the villas the spikes have clawlike protuberances, six on each, curved and sharp as talons. A certain terrace has spikes on pillars, splaying out and blossoming like thorn trees. If you started counting spikes in the region of the park and its surroundings you could reach millions. They go well with the Georgian architecture.

By night the park is closed to people. Of the living creatures that remain within its confines, most are zoo animals and waterfowl. The spiked gates open every morning of the year at six and close every evening at dusk, which is at four-thirty in winter but not until nine-thirty in May. Its 464 acres of land fill a circle. Inside the ring of streets that surrounds it lies another ring and within this, widely separated, the equilateral triangle of the London Zoo, the lake with its three arms and four islands, and around the ornamental gardens a road that on the map looks like a wheel with two projecting spokes.

The park is deserted by night. That is, the intention is that it should be deserted. The park police patrol between dusk and dawn, paying special attention to the restaurant areas that make likely shelters and to the park residences, the villas, the expensive properties,
and Winfield House, where the American ambassador lives. No vagrant could sleep undisturbed under the lee of the pavilions or the bandstand, but the police cannot search everywhere every night. The canal bank remains as a place of concealment amid the wide green spaces and, in summer, the long grass under the trees.

To the north of the park, beyond the zoo and Albert Road, lie Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood; here are St. John’s Wood church, Lords Cricket Ground, and, turning south eastward, the Central London Mosque. Park Road runs down toward Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes by way of the London Business School and St. Cyprian’s Church, Anglo-Catholic, white and gold inside and scented with incense. The Marylebone Road, the Planetarium, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks—most popular of all London’s tourist attractions, more visited than the Tower and Buckingham Palace—the Royal Academy of Music, Park Crescent and Park Square with their secret gardens and the tunnel passing under the road that links them. And so the park is encircled, here by Albany Street, running from Great Portland Street station due north, as straight as a Roman road, to meet Albert Road and Gloucester Avenue. The streets of Primrose Hill form a shape like a tennis racket and Gloucester Avenue is its handle. There are railings everywhere, their spikes straight and pointed, twisted at a right angle or ornate and blunted.

•   •   •

Albany Street is not leafy and sequestered like almost every other in the vicinity of the park, but wide, gray, without trees. Barracks fill much of one side, but beyond the other side of it lie the grandest and most lavish of the terraces, Cambridge, Chester, and Cumberland, with their colonnades, their pediments, their statuary, and their wealthy occupants. Beyond the other side the area quickly becomes less respectable, though it has a long way to go before sinking to the level of Somers Town between Euston and St. Pancras stations. From one of these streets, near St. James’s Gardens, a young man
was walking across Munster Square, heading for Albany Street.

The name everyone called him by was Hob, the three letters of which were the initials of his two given names and his surname. Apart from this, the feature that distinguished him from his contemporaries was the size of his head. His body was solid and thickset but his head still looked too big for it. When he reached fifty, if he ever did, his jowls would be down on his shoulders. His fair hair was cut an inch long all over his big head and gleamed in the yellowish chemical light. It was an unusual combination, that of fair hair and brown eyes. His eyes were a curious textured brown, like chocolate mousse, and the pupils were sometimes as big as a cat’s and sometimes the size of a full stop on a keyboard.

Hob had a job to do, for which he had just been paid half his fee of fifty pounds. That is, he had been paid twenty-five pounds. This he intended to put with everything else—he had to buy what he needed before he could do anything at all. Often he wished he were a woman, because for women making money was quick and, as far as he could see, easy. One of the first things he remembered hearing from a grown-up—it was an uncle, his mother’s boyfriend—was that every woman is sitting on a fortune.

He was in a state. That was how he put it to himself, the phrase he always used for his present condition. One of his stepsisters had described her panic attacks to him and in her description he recognized his own state. But his was longer-lasting and somehow
bigger
. It took in the whole world. It made him afraid of everything he could see and hear and just as frightened of what he couldn’t see and of silence. As the state intensified, a huge bubble of fear like a glass ball enclosed him so that he wanted to beat and thrash at its curved walls. Sometimes he did, even out in the street like this, and people crossed the road to avoid this madman who punched at the empty air.

The state had not yet reached this level. Nor did he yet have pain or nausea. But beyond walking to his destination, up this long, wide gray street where at present there were no people to avoid him or to
stare, he could have done nothing, certainly not the job for which he had received half the fee. Walking became mechanical. Even in a state he sometimes thought he could have walked forever, on and on, over the dark lawns, the green peak, the hills of north London, to the fields and woods far beyond.

But walking miles would be unnecessary. Gupta or Carl or Lew would be on the other side of the Cumberland Gate, where the Chinese trees were. He walked through the wells and alleys and up the slope at Cumberland Terrace. His shadow was a lumbering black cutout on wrinkled cobbles. Lights shone up on walls and behind cascades of leaves.

The Outer Circle, so busy by day, was deserted at night and no single car was parked on its gleaming surface. The great terraces, palaces in woodland, slept heavily behind dark foliage, and though many of their eyes were shuttered, some were alive with orange light. Lamps were lit along the pavements as far as he could see in each direction. The spaces between them were filled with shiny darkness. He crossed the road. The Cumberland Gate was locked and had been for nearly three hours.

The railing of which the gate was made was topped with iron spikes, eighteen on each gate. When he was well—the term he used for his condition when not in a state—he would have thought nothing of climbing the gate. Now he scrambled over it like an old man with an old man’s caution and fear of puncturing flesh and breaking bones. On the other side an expanse of half dark lay, gray lawn, pale paths, black trees, spindly black Chinese trees that made him think of scorpions.

The police patrolled in cars, on foot, on bicycles, sometimes with dogs. It was a principle of his, and of Carl’s, that they cannot ever be everywhere. Mostly they were not where he was or Carl was. He walked into the trees. He meant not to make a sound but when a young scorpion leapt off its parent’s back and grew wings and
turned into a pterodactyl—it was a pigeon flying from a treetop—he let out a cry of fear.