Utterly Monkey (28 page)

Nick Laird on the London of
Utterly Monkey

I
ONCE MET
a taxi driver who claimed to remember everything. He said he could remember, exactly, the events of his third birthday, or the weather on Tuesday morning three weeks ago, or what he had for dinner, say, on the eighteenth of December in 1975. You can see how it might have been hard to disprove his claims but anyway I believed him. At the end of the chat, when I was lugging boxes of legal documents onto a pavement on Cheapside, he said, “It’s a curse, you know. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Almost every week London surprises me. I spent twenty minutes once, on a platform at Dalston Kingsland railway station, talking to an old Jamaican man in a porkpie hat about whether, in the event that a rat and a pigeon got into a fight, the advantage of flight would always ensure success. We had been watching a huge rat meander around the greased tracks as pigeons pecked and shuffled by the bench and around our feet. He was, I felt, unfairly biased towards the birds. When the train came he didn’t get on.

Last week I found an old document on my computer desktop of possible names for
Utterly Monkey.
I was surprised to find that I had, however briefly, considered writing books called
Man Walks into a Bar, Particularly Human, Complicity, Going Concerns, The Impulse to Do Bad, The Coffin Boys, Please Outpace Us, Religion for Dogs,
and
Leaving the Scene of an Accident.
Actually,
Leaving the Scene of an Accident
isn’t too bad,
just a bit long, but none of the titles seemed to have anything to do with the book I eventually wrote. For several months it was entitled, not entirely jokingly, “Can You Hear Me Now Fuckface?”—incidentally a name I still like very much. If I should ever write a story for children, I might have to use it. The title
Utterly Monkey
is probably no better than the rest but, now that I’ve heard it so many times, it doesn’t seem so bad: familiarity breeding a grudging acceptance, I suppose, before the onset of contempt. In the list of names were also several equally dreadful titles involving London: “The Metropolitan,” “Kingsland,” and “Big Smoke.”

London is central to the book, as both a place and an idea. When you’re growing up in a small town, London comes to mean freedom or at least the brand of freedom occasioned by leaving your family and slipping into the anonymity of city life.

It must be the most ethnically diverse city in the world, and it isn’t like an American city, where diversity is mostly ghettoized. Sitting on the bus in London, eavesdropping, is like spinning the dial through a long wave radio, picking up Warsaw, Paris, Dublin, Nairobi, and Mumbai. And that depth is vertical as well as horizontal. London is like that taxi driver, swamped in history.

When I lived on the Cut in Waterloo, I’d wander down Hercules Road, where William Blake lived. When I rented a room in Barbican I’d traipse Bunhill Row, where Milton lived for twelve years, until his death. It was here that he wrote
Paradise Lost,
and, looking around at the car parks and high-rises, you can see what he was thinking. London might not be pretty, but she is interesting. Bunhill Fields cemetery is also where Blake is buried, and
Daniel Defoe, who died in nearby Moorfieldsin 1731, at his lodgings in Ropemaker’s Alley.

The City of London itself is sunk in the greatest writings of them all. In
Utterly Monkey
the character Danny works, as did I, in a city law firm on Cheapside. I remember the first thrill of hearing that word again—Cheapside—and how it reminded me of Shakespeare, of Mistress Quickly and Falstaff.
In Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king, as king I will be….
Now of course it’s men in ill-fitting pinstripes going to seed rather than horses gone to grass, Starbucks instead of the Mermaid Tavern. I used to drink in the Cockpit, a pub nearby that was once Shakespeare’s house. They think that the basement of the pub has remained unchanged since Shakespeare’s time. I am going to go out for a walk.

Two Poems by Nick Laird

from
To a Fault,
published by Faber (2005) and Norton (2006). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Cuttings

Done

Objects on My Desk at 11:36
A.M
. on July 4, 2005

P
RINTER
, papers, a wooden box containing three Rizlas (cigarette papers), and a small gold key that I’ve been keeping for years in case I remember which lock it’s for; a silver plastic Anglepoise-shaped light, a monitor, two small computer speakers, a Desk Calendar of Forgotten English (still at Wednesday, 15 June, the word for that day being
outsucken
meaning “the freedom of a tenant from bondage to a mill…”); a glasses’ case containing one pair of spectacles and two soft cloths to clean them; three cheques made out to me, a dirty ashtray, a card from my dentist reminding me of an appointment tomorrow at 12:30
P.M
.; a free CD that came with a magazine and is still in its wrapping; more paper, a small silver diary with a pencil in its spine, my elbows, a black wire pen tidy I found when clearing out my sister’s flat; assorted pens—mostly felt tips, paper, an air freshener to get rid of the smell of smoke, a book chair holding drafts of poems and the print-out of some of the second novel; more paper, a Samsung mobile phone, a Make Poverty History white wristband, a silver Casio digital watch, a silver ID bracelet, a leather coaster; £2.27 in coins, some books (Edna Longley’s
Poetry in the Wars,
Saul Bellow’s
Seize the Day,
and Francis Wheen’s
How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World)
, a calculator, some letters, a keyboard, a wrist-rest, a mouse mat, a mouse; an almost empty glass of Sanguinello orange juice, a see-thru green lighter, a pair of red-handled scissors, a snakeskin wallet
from Vietnam with cash and cards and photos in it; a program from the 18th John Hewitt International Summer School, a battery, a packet of Extra chewing gum (peppermint), several more pens including one which says Fotoincisione Tanini; two packets of Post-it flags (red and green), a smoked plastic two-tiered in-tray full of letters and drafts, and one white Binatone Trend landline telephone with a broken ringer.

Poems Attached by Blue-Tac to the Door of My Study as of 12:04
A.M
. on July 4, 2005

The Sixteen Most Played Songs on My iTunes as of 10:52
A.M
. on July 4, 2005