There was a newsagent’s that was no more than a corridor lined with racks of magazines with a plump sari-ed woman planted at its till. I stopped for this, caught by the smallness of it and the welcome hint of possibility that came with this scale. Might this be comparable to a soft ice-cream machine on Zanzibar? The intensity of my possessive thoughts reached the plump woman because she suddenly turned to me with an angry look that sent me on my way. Dicky Dirts—an empty shop full of the jeans that I now noticed were not as fashionable in Bayswater as they had been in Dar. The Diwana—vegetarian Indian food. A huge bookshop only for books in Arabic or about Arab countries. A cafe with sinuous brass teapots in its window that would have been at home in Zanzibar. I looked up: “Le Cafe,” said the sign. The window was misty with condensation but I could make out people talking over small tables crowded with the paraphernalia of coffee, tea and cakes. It did not cross my mind for a second that I might walk in out of the rain and sit down at a table.
A bus rushed past, fast and close, its wheels in the gutter, passengers hanging on to its rear platform, holding tight and riding the breeze. I needed to keep my wits about me. The taxis, I noticed, had little golden lights on their roofs, like jewels. Why were they never full?
That night I walked the backbone of my future life. Le Cafe would become my daily stopping place for croissants and cappuccino, words I had yet to learn. The Iraqi owners would become my friends. Across the road and down a side street I could have made out, if I had known to look, a dingy Greek cafe that one day would fill my every thought. Further on along Westbourne Grove there was the Abyssinia restaurant, which I now passed, without thinking to look up to the flat above that would one day be my home. At the traffic lights where Westbourne Grove met Queensway, if I had looked left instead of right, I would have seen Porchester Baths and might have been cheered by future meditative swims, Russian saunas, deep massages. I might have noticed Arthur Court and Ralph Court, good blocks of flats, it would turn out, for placing short-term foreign visitors. Or ahead I could have picked out the wet, deserted patio of the Pizza Express where one day Benji and I would scheme together and darken in the sun. Knowing none of this, I weighted everything evenly, ready to give each place an equal chance.
The backbone of my future life turned right at the lights, following the current into Queensway. Then, abruptly, one side of the street was entirely dead, dark and avoided by pedestrians. An enormous grey building with fluted columns and domed roofs occupied the gloom. The windows were boarded and its clock was stopped. No one wanted to be on that side of the street. I slowed and stopped to examine the building while people walked around me, remembering Zanzibar, the old fort, the House of Wonders, our population of ghosts. Whiteley’s Department Store, read the sign. I stood there, wondering how and when and why, seemingly the only one touched and made anxious by this evidence of gigantic economic catastrophe.
I was becoming exhausted by my ridiculous effort to comprehend Bayswater in a single evening. Carpenters the hardware shop, Nisa the supermarket, Thomas Cook, a Post Office: each failed to properly register in my mental file. I misjudged the rapid progress of a group of young men and was buffeted like a scrap of paper. Now I was in the brightest part of Bayswater, where Queensway burned at its highest wattage for the sake of the foreign tourists, but I felt exposed by the light rather than drawn to it. I pushed on. Mongolian food. Bulgarian food. Pizza Hut. Bayswater Tube station did not produce the slightest frisson of premonition. The woman being helped from a car outside the Golden Horseshoe casino might as well have been the other side of glass. A life for me here was less and less imaginable with each step. The awning announcing Queens Ice Skating Club seemed impossibly strange. Two girls in short, frilly skirts burst out, skates tied around their necks and bouncing against their chests. The Coburg Hotel occupying Queensway’s final corner—the end of the road, thank goodness— looked grand and forbidding to me then, with its redbrick walls and domed turrets. Ahead was a road of fast- moving traffic and beyond that the gated darkness of Kensington Gardens. I turned on my heel, feeling that I had now seen everything of my new home, but instead of my wide eyes being rewarded with the revelation of a new life, I had been mocked by abundance, like a hopeful new wife discovering she is only the two hundredth concubine of an old and absent-minded sultan.
Not far into my more inward return, I found myself gaping stupidly at a phone box covered with the advertising cards of prostitutes: wet sex, new young Asian, domination, oral, anal, uniforms. When I registered what was in front of my eyes and the inappropriateness of my attention to it, I instead pretended to look across the road, and found my eyes on a dull patch between a Chinese restaurant and a luggage shop, a dingy church of yellow brick turning grey. Our Lady Queen of Heaven Catholic Church. St Joe’s in Zanzibar was far grander. I stared, amid all the strangeness, and wondered whether there might
