Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

Peter & Carrie Devereux's Prologue

 A short walk down Brewer Street is all it takes to give any human being with a brain an insight into the world of Soho. The district, locale, ‘urban village’ – whatever you wish to call it – was little more than a degenerate muddle in every single sense; it must be a little worrying for anyone with a clean and sober mind to take a wander through a region of the world which seems to have a licenced sex shop lit in blazing neon on every street corner and a pub spewing with confused, stumbling, tumbling drunkards halfway down every block. You could even be led to believe that the planner who designed the dire tangle of alleyways composing Soho was wasted when he drew this place out; the streets are as confusing as the most sinister of labyrinths but, you never know, it could look perfectly logical to a bloke with a couple of litres of alcohol inside him. All that lay north of Leicester Square, south of Oxford Street, east of the Dials and west of Regent Street was refuse, the streets a dumping ground for the people and the places that the rest of the world had dubbed too dirty, a citadel of sleaze. Soho, and its accompanying lifestyle, was one that many despised and many drifted in and out of like the tides at Southend briefly invade the coast just to slink away, but very few truly lived.

 Among the residents of the dark, seedy tarmac maze - those who truly 'lived' the life of Soho - was a young man - in his early twenties, but still very puerile - named Peter Devereux, a man with dark, slicked-back hair, a sculpted face and chest and a tongue as beautifully sweet as all the sugar in the world. He was the perfect young bloke for any girl - or at least he would be if he wasn't getting smashed with his mates all the time.  Peter was one of those permanently drunk, starry-eyed residents of Soho, and to him, Soho was paradise on earth. After all, as he always made a point of telling me; 'Good boys go to Heaven, but bad boys, my dear, go to London.' He was, of course, the epitome of the 'bad boys' he spoke of; he and his best mates would paint the town red nightly and then splatter every other colour known to man on top. Peter and the folk with which he regularly drank while he resided in Soho were the sort who would not be satisfied if they had not plastered themselves in every pub and bar from Covent Garden to Carnaby Street before the big party began. And, of course, they were the sort who, if they had managed to fall asleep until Amersham on their journey home, would wonder how they had not managed to fall asleep until Aberdeen.

Tonight, on the other hand, was a little different for Peter. During a chance encounter in a bar on Wardour Street he had managed to keep himself just about sober enough to work his magical charm on a young lady, sober enough to make her want to see him again and again. Tonight, he was sitting as quiet as can be on a bench facing the platforms of Waterloo Station, waiting for the eighteen-fourteen from Brighton to arrive at London Bridge. Of course, Peter knew that he was at the wrong station, but neither he nor the girl he was there to meet quite fancied meeting at that brown monstrosity. No, despite the inconvenience, Carrie was perfectly willing to change and make the one-stop journey to Waterloo East in order to meet her man from the old Smoke. Besides, it was a nicer walk from Waterloo; you could see the glittering lights of the City skyscrapers and the silver and golden hues of Westminster which worked to hide the place that gave Peter and Carrie’s lives lustre. Given the amount of times he had listened to his father playing 'Waterloo Sunset' on the old record player that, in the coming years, would come to rest in his lounge, you could see that he held am obsession with the romantic nature of the grey old bridge across the murky Thames, the view of the train shed blanketed in white cloud and the hallowed spot under the clock; he kept the firm belief that he and Carrie were two young lovebirds engaging in a tradition stretching back a good forty-five years. Peter glanced at his watch, then up at the escalator from which Carrie would descend. Not long left.

“Peter!”

She looked effortlessly elegant in a dress which radiated retrospective; Carrie made a habit of overdressing whenever she was to meet Peter. She was the woman Peter had been dying to meet for aeons; she was a strong-willed young woman, but quirky and childish to the extent that she could well have leapt off the pages of a children's book when she entered Peter's life. Her hair whipped up around her face as the winds rushed through the open concourse of the station; she swept across the concourse with all the grace of a dancer of the Bolshoi and with all the youthful excitement of a two-year old promised a trip to the local sweet shop. There was, in Peter's opinion, no aspect of Carrie you could claim was imperfect; she had no flaws, no shortcomings, for she was a goddess incarnate. Carrie had found something wrong with Peter - or rather, with what he was holding in his hand. "You still carry that photograph around with you," chuckled Carrie as she leant upon her lover's shoulder. "Frame it, Peter. Do something with it. It's getting crumpled up in there. It's the only copy we had made and I can't find the film."

As Carrie had danced her way over from the escalators from Waterloo East to join Peter below the four clock faces, he had pulled a small, stained photograph from the pocket of the waterproof coat he had insisted on wearing despite the twenty degree heat, and had spent the moments prior to her reaching him staring intently at it, the only memory he had of a night which, due to the unfortunate influence of lager and cheap, bargain-basement red wine, had become somewhat of a blur in his mind.

       "Why would I ever want to do that, dear," he responded, resting an arm around Carrie's exposed shoulder. "We're not a museum piece. Our love isn't some relic of a bygone era. It's active. It's alive. It's not frozen in time and we can't pretend it'll stay pristine forever, Carrie." He looked upwards, towards a train which had begun to pull off silently from the fog-enshrouded platforms ahead of them. "Besides, at least this way we're never truly apart. When you're in Brighton, I can hardly sleep. I-I can't do anything." He paused, taking a fresh breath from the air which circulated in from the exit behind them. "I wish you'd stay with me, Carrie. I'll even give up Soho for you. I don't care. I'll even move south of the Thames, just so we can be together."

       "I don't know," Carrie replied, a reply met with an almost instantaneous sigh and a drooping smile from the man beside him. "I like it down here. I love you, I really do, but all of my friends, my family, are down in Sussex."

        "You can get here within about an hour and a half, dear," said Peter. "All a move up here would involve is a few more back and forth trips."

         "I just don't see it happenning, Peter. At least not yet." She glanced back at the figures of herself and Peter in the photograph in his hands. "I do enjoy my time up here, though," she continued. "That first night really was magical, wasn't it."

   This encounter at Waterloo Station marked the third time they had ever seen each other;  the last time they had seen each other was a month ago on the Brighton waterfront, that time when the rain came down like Niagara, leaving them soaked to the bare bone lying on the pebbles of the beach laughing and telling jokes as the waves lapped up on the pebble-strewn shoreline; the time before that they met in Marylebone, a little further afield than was usual for Peter, where they met up for lunch in a High Street gastropub after a morning in the department stores of Oxford and Regent Streets (oh, how he moaned when he found out about the two-drink limit before six o’clock); and, of course, on the day that they first met four months ago, in the summer of ninety-three .  Neither Peter nor Carrie had never actually told anyone I knew the whole story about the night upon which his eyes first fell upon hers, but what is known about the night is this: they kissed within the first hour of their meeting, and kissed in style. Nobody was ever sure exactly how they had managed this feat – not even Peter and Carrie themselves who were, as usual, wasted out of their minds at the time – but what we do know is that, at some point on that neon-lit night, they were hanging from Eros itself, grasping the fragile metal pillar connecting him to the base of the statue with one hand and collecting the night air with the other, watching the people pass by in all directions; to Soho, to Piccadilly, to the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue and then, as the wind swung them around the pillar to face each other, they finally kissed. 

       "I'd give anything to relive that moment for the rest of my days," interjected Carrie, her voice carving through the summer air. "That kiss, Peter, was the most perfect moment of my life."

       "I wouldn't," remarked Peter. "Think about it. You'd be missing out on every other moment we could possibly share together; a starlit proposal; a white wedding; raising a son or a daughter." He leant into her shoulder as yet another train passed from the platforms. "You never know," he mused. " Tonight could be even more perfect than the night we first met, but if we stay here, we will never know." Both he and Carrie took one last look at the photo as the clock faces above them struck half six. "Come on, darling," he whispered. "The sun's about to descend over the Bridge. Day is turning to night, and for us, Carrie,  another night of a lifetime is about to begi..."

PING!

A bullet shot past my left ear. I suddenly remembered where I was.