The Boys

The station at Elephant and Castle has bleak views of high-rises, touched by the domestic - the tall white building with trees growing at the top. The old shopping centre with its sparse survivors - the girdle shop by the escalators, the kebab shop on the ground floor near Tesco - has been closed down.

The regeneration project had been upstaged by the new pandemic. We rode in on a misty Saturday in November, and came out on the side-street next to the new shopping centre, like a pristine, empty town in itself with signs advertising the locked-down shops. Our breath created personal whiteness in front of us. A man weaved towards the main road, periodically screaming FUCK YOU MAN. Under the overpass a woman was sitting on the pavement, her back against some railings, staring rigidly forward, wearing open-toe sandals.

We stood on a piazza outside Pret and watched a line shuffle efficiently, bringing people to coffees, while a man with a begging sign sat on the ground and watched them. We laughed at an advert for a Christmas sandwich and a foamy Christmas coffee. A man swung out of the mist, wailing a shanty. Xav said that it was the worst of both worlds - sterile gentrification and the deprived still wandering through, past the boarded-up site where local businesses had lived and died, past the christmassy face of Pret and the silent line of consumers. I said,

"Maybe Andi’s coming. Hanno said ‘We’re on the bus.’”

Out of the mist we saw two tall people cross the road - it was two tall men: Hanno and Billy.

We said hello. Billy and Xav took out flasks of coffee, Hanno said that the regeneration of Elephant and Castle was the worst of both worlds - sterile gentrification, etc. He gestured to my coat and said,

”Is this new? I like it!”

I said, “I don’t know about the buttons.”

He said, “No, it’s nice! The buttons make you look like an old sea captain. They make you look like a rotarian. I think that, empirically speaking, those buttons are racist. I mean, speaking about empire. People are going to see those buttons and expect you to start colonising them.”

We walked to the bridge, dividing into pairs, joining and dividing again, and stopped to make our official sighting of the yellowed furbelows of the houses of parliament - Dirty Ben. Hanno said they were a simulacrum of gothic architecture crowded onto a Victorian steel frame where their bulk wasn’t structurally necessary - “It’s very postmodern.”

“That’s why brutalism -” said Billy, and Hanno interrupted loudly,

“Brutalism is such a meme! Every crypto-normie twitter guy follows that brutalist fanboy account -”

Billy’s eyes went cold as he waited till he could speak again. He was wearing Adidas trainers, electric-blue joggers, a down-filled puffer jacket and a beanie.

When we got to St James’s Park, Hanno had a fact about Duck Island Cottage and Billy had a fact about the Governor of Duck Island and Xav had a fact about the poet Stephen Duck and his wife, Sarah Big Duck. I’m from London, but the way I live hasn’t involved information. I once dreamed I lived in Admiralty Arch and was making Big Money.

From St James’s Park to Green Park we looked at the birds: a pelican plucking its elastic breast like a lute with its huge bill, tufted ducks, mallards, pochards, moorhens. Hanno read from the information boards and declaimed the species. Billy knew their names already and dropped them in a casual way.

“I love the herons,” said Hanno, pointing, “I love the … cormorants.”

None of us corrected him. I for one felt profoundly embarrassed that he was in the wrong.

In Kensington Gardens, the boys opened a bottle of wine.

“It’s time now, isn’t it?” said Hanno.

“It’s time,” said Billy. They took out separate cups so they didn't have to drink out of their coffee cups. We walked as they drank. Hanno’s phone rang. He had a short conversation - yes, eight o’clock, perfect - and hung up.

“That was Andi’s mum.”

I said, “She calls you?”

“Yes - we’re all very tight. In a way that’s been one of the hardest parts of the whole thing: our parents have been talking among themselves, kind of having committee meetings, and if we have dinner or anything they keep bringing it up, and kind of insisting that it has to happen…”

“How have things been?”

“It looks like we’re not breaking up at the moment,” he said. “I don’t want to sound too certain. We’re together and we’re taking it very slowly … You know in your twenties, you rush into things, you pursue this career while caning it every night, get a forty-year mortgage ... I was going to ask her to marry me. I’d booked a hotel in Dubrovnik - you know, King’s Landing, I was going to propose, and then lockdown happened ... But it turns out she probably wouldn’t have said yes.”

I’d never been out of that side of Kensington Gardens, by the Russian embassy. We walked down a street of diplomatic houses: imposingly large, detached and set squarely in their plots, some of them were beautiful, most of all the Slovenian embassy. The boys were excited, running to and fro across the road, exchanging facts about the houses and the nations they represented. As Xav said later, it was nice to see them happy. We stopped in front of the Nepalese embassy, which was in a bit of a state, with an overgrown hedge and wires hanging loose from the building. The boys got another bottle of wine in Whole Foods when we were buying lunch.

“I know, you two are so good … we’ve been having a few lockdown dinners, just with Billy. We’re his bubble, and anyway it’s hardly a risk, he doesn’t see anyone, his girlfriend dumped him … Anyway, on his birthday we had a few people over, but Andi had to send them away. We had dinner, and drank all this wine, did all this coke, then I brought out the killepitsch, and Andi had to text everyone from upstairs and say, sorry, but you have to leave because Hanno’s being sick everywhere. She was really salty with me all the next day. She said, there's a disgusting stain on the tiles, what did you do? And I said, what do you think I am? I didn't poo on the floor, I vomited on the floor."

Billy said he’d been sick too when he got home. They’d been eating beetroot risotto so it came out red.

"I hope you don’t mind that we didn’t invite you,” said Hanno to Xav. “But you’re so observant, and anyway you have each other. Billy doesn't see anyone apart from me."

There was a certain contempt in the way he said this, and contempt in the way Billy ignored it.

We ate pizza sitting on a tree trunk, and walked on till we stood in front of the Albert Memorial. It looked bland, with its gold glimmer and top-heavy gazebo on a shallow plinth. We’d walked from empire to empire, from Parliament to Buckingham Palace and now here. Every corner had statues representing a continent with its emblems and vassals: Europe was represented by four people in crowns and a big cow.

The Royal Artillery Memorial. The Wellington Arch. The Commonwealth Memorial Gates. We walked back through Hyde Park and Green Park, talking about history. I was starting to think Hanno couldn’t hack it like he used to. His voice was getting slurred and his face looked fleshy and old.

Billy said, “What shall we do after this?”

“Get some beers and come back to ours. We can watch Star Wars… ”

“I think me and Xav are going to go home.”

“I think for someone like me it’s good to hear these things that no one ever says… she says these really devastating things but it’s good for me to know how she feels. And at least we’re talking. She said I used to be the best thing in her life, but now I’m the worst thing. So I hope I can go back to that ... I told my parents, and they said, the things that she’s complaining about are probably the same things she used to like about you - you know, I talk a lot, I party all the time. Last week we’d nearly decided to split up for good, and she was saying, it’s not working, but then we went for such a nice meal, and I was making her laugh, we were making all our old jokes, and she said, I'm having such a nice time! Why do you have to make everything so confusing? ..."

****

Billy and Xav and I went to see Andi in the flat that she and Hanno had bought together. I felt like I was touring the remains of a civilisation, with its bare walls and colossal monuments: the sofa they had bought and argued about, the mid-century table. When they moved in, the walls had been an inhospitable blue, but they’d been painted since then. We went and looked at the plant pot in the back yard.

Andi handed us tea in mugs that looked like flint, with a characteristic expression she had when she was handing you something, as if she was about to be sick. She had that kind of beauty which could only be thrown into relief by vomiting. The kitchen was finished, and perfected. There wasn’t a single thing that looked grotty, or out of place, or only functional.

We went and looked upstairs. In the bathroom I had a look at the tiles but couldn’t see any stains. We went in the bedroom. I remembered when she came for drinks at ours when we first moved in, and looked at the heap of cushions and mats that we slept on at the time. She and I had jumped up and down on them silently to assess their quality. I remembered a time when she and Billy and Xav lay on a bed together because they'd had too much ketamine and couldn't move or speak. And the mattress that Billy had disposed of when he and his girlfriend broke up and he had to move to a cheaper flat. He couldn’t wait a month for the council to collect it, so he chopped it up like a body and distributed it in bins all round Lewisham.