Visible Cities

—‘A vile and ridiculous meditation’ Sunday Times

Translated from the English by Rrose Mutt

Esmerelda does not necessarily believe everything I say when I describe the cities I have visited on my expeditions, but she does continue listening to me with greater attention and curiosity than she shows anyone else I know of, and with rather less derision than I am used to. I have observed her presenting her considerable hindquarters to the garrulous tale-telling of other adventurers in my block. Esmerelda scrubs floors and scours the interiors of ovens with a thoroughness and single-mindedness that can baffle even the shrillest and most tenacious of speakers.

The Lion City has evolved on an island surrounded by tepid, thickly salted waters. It is actually three cities in one, each arranged within the other like the skins of an onion. The innermost ‘skin’ is a series of kampongs linked, and inter-linked, by a maze of rickety wooden walkways. The dwellings, like the walkways, are balanced on hardwood poles above a slimy swamp of mangrove roots and dull grey pools, which not only collects tidal effluvia but acts as a repository for the city’s garbage. The smell is not objectionable to nostrils accustomed to the sewers of Paris or the Venetian lido. Besides, wild pigs, dogs, fowls, crocodiles and other scavenging creatures soon clear up the freshest and most offensive of the droppings. Fisherman lay enormous wooden traps called ‘kilong’ in the lagoon, and sampans ply the waterways, when the tide is in, the infant oarsmen steering with leisurely thrusts of a single pole like Oxford punters. In these vessels sit old women in broad-brimmed conical hats made of strips of bamboo, or raffia of some kind. They sell bananas, bolts of cloth, copperware, and the exceptionally long green cheroots (they are a yard or more in length, dear Esmerelda, and have a sweet peppery taste) called ‘rokos’. Their sales patter is innovative and comical. I was invited to a copperware party where I might use a banana to advantage.

The walkways are thronged with picturesque lounging warriors with black tattooed thighs and red betel-stained mouths. Some of the men file their teeth to points and
insert iron plugs into their earlobes. They have muscular arms and legs, and demonstrate a supple spring when mounting the stepped tree-trunks that do for ladders. This agility, supplemented by the barbarity of their appearance, endows their staring with an unearthly and I have to say discomforting intensity of interest. When I passed through them, my dear Esmerelda, my flesh fairly crawled and I shuddered inwardly, expecting a poisoned dart in my neck followed by a prolonged tenderising of my choicest cuts in one of the large cast-iron pots they keep on their verandas. Nothing like that happened, as you may have surmised. In fact I have probably misled you. They are not at all inhospitable. Indeed, they offer their women to their visitors as a sort of Dutch wife for the night. The women are not much use as courtesans, however, as they copulate like beasts, without skill or pleasure.

The land is heavily forested beyond the sloping thatch. The clouds are low-lying, and of a bruised purple or nacreous coloration. There are no landmarks.

Esmerelda tackles the bathroom with Clorox and a hose. I hear her grunts as she wrestles with the toilet bowl, crashing it against the wall in her passion. I told her that one could get lost in the city because the walkways were labyrinthine and unending. I told her that there were strangers who had entered and never left, who had even fathered children and now stepped amongst the tattooed denizens naked and unremarked. I saw a man with grey eyes, startling in that brown anonymous setting. His hand touched my arm, as if he meant to say something, but then it fell away, and he returned to the throng, and I never saw him again.

The Lion City’s second skin is made up of wharves, go-downs, asphalted roads, deep V-shaped ditches, swarming bullock carts and rickshaws, and above these, on the shapely bougainvillea-draped hills, shuttered mansions and white colonnaded civic buildings with red-tiled roofs nestled amidst blue jacarandas and red sealing-wax palms. There is a playing field, called a padang, behind the go-downs, in which sweating Englanders in shirtsleeves hurl varnished crimson balls at black-bearded sacerdotal figures crouched over three gleaming candle-yellow sticks. These figures strike the balls back smartly, eliciting a pleasant pick-pock-puck from the collision of willow-white blade and bouncing leather-bound ball. Dark-featured youths with high jutting bottoms retrieve the balls from the malarial marshes and spiky nibongs that border the padang. They receive a penny for their thoughts. Men in white ducks with cork-tipped cigarettes and pale women in floral frocks, tipsy with gin and bitters, exchange languid glances in the Whites-Only clubs. In the dens of the city, there are tea-gardens, in which disgraced remittance men dance with transvestites, and narrow lanes of shophouses, in which busty Hokkien men and flat-chested Vietnamese prostitutes, the latter with rosebud lips in rib and thigh-hugging cheongsams, squabble over mah jong, gold bullion, opium pipes, birds-nests and the membra virile of tigers. The Malays, a dour hard-faced people with mahogany skins and barrel chests, wearing nothing but rolled-up sarongs, run amok in the spice markets, stabbing chickens and Sikh policemen. Darker beings, possibly Tamil, furtive and stick-legged, communicating in a soft twittering speech, work the rubber plantations to the east of the city. They die continually, in large numbers. They leave no graves.

Steam-ships anchor in the harbour, between Boat Quay and Clarke Quay. From some of these descend naked porters bearing portmanteaus and great leathern trunks. Men in solar topees and women in net hats, narrow-eyed merchants and wide-eyed missionaries, moustachioed patent medicine salesmen and planters, the latter hangdog and hungover, follow. On one gangplank, I saw a pretty little girl in a white flounced frock come skipping down. She had a hoop which she rolled along the quay and sped after, striking it with a stick. A Celestial of uncertain sex and great antiquity hobbled after her, shouting obscenities, while Memsahib looked on with a detached glassy smile. I saw a florid Sahib climb down scowling from a rickshaw. He started after the elderly androgyne in a fury, his fingers closing round the ebony head of his Malacca cane. Punishments here are summary and exquisitely prolonged. Generally, thickset policemen in braces and rolled-up sleeves flog the malefactors, who are, yes, when it comes down to it, mostly those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than the floggers, on a rack in full public view. They use flexible rattan canes, which leave deep wounds in the flesh. I have watched the floggings several times, mostly on my way back from luncheon in Raffles, near the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, and have remarked the way the flogged grit their teeth and utter not a word in repentance or even agony.

Some ships disberth files of skinny Dravidians in loincloths, each bearing a paper of indenture, or Malay pilgrims shaven-headed and decked out in the skimpy white raiment of devotion, the wives following after, huddled up in black sacking and face-veils. But mostly, the ships take on cargos of guttapercha and palm-oil, pepper and nutmegs, coffee and timber, all day long, which, later, they carry off across a flat rippling sea the colour of stainless-steel to the freezing continent in the north. You can see them steam away, large creaking iron plates riveted together in Glasgow, beneath red and black stacks painted in Barrow-in-Furnace, dwindling to magical silver darts trailing radiating lines that never seem to lose shape or direction. The smoke of the stacks adds a black underbelly to the heavy cumbrous grey gut of the sky.

Esmerelda never stops for tea. She works at breakneck speed, sluicing the terrace, swabbing the walls, vacuuming the carpets, beating dust out of the beds. Sometimes, when her eyes light on mine, I detect a kind of darkness behind her pupils. Yet she regards me with fondness, I am sure, handling my ornaments with rough tenderness, lending an attentive ear when I follow her from bedroom to kitchen to living-room and back again. She rarely speaks, but when she does she utters words of encouragement and praise, remarking a new mask, exclaiming over a Tibetan chest, touching with wonder the sleek tube of a blowpipe.

The third skin is made of concrete and glass. It soars above the river. It is called Central Business District, or CBD. Money clings to the insides of its transparent walls like pale green gekkoes. The melancholy heart-wrenching bloop-bloop of drongos has given way to the hideous bawling of cell phones. The skyscrapers reach through the clouds. They symbolise not vanity or sexual potency but the power of money, financial clout, the dry rustle of freshly printed bills. The towers mimic not the topless towers of Illium but the toppled ones of Wall Street and the World Trade Center. This is the newest and oldest of dreams—the dream of untold riches, the Midas touch, the clink of coin. Here the young flock in search of a windfall. Here youths, with buzz haircuts, gimlet eyes and swollen crotches, land, slinging aside their jackets, rolling up their sleeves to plunder remote exchequers and invent new ones out of thin air. In Harry's Bar, at the foot of the towers, you can see them nursing their beers, spitting calculus through soy sauce smeared mouths. It is number and quantity that drives them, the infinity figure that cannot be counted. The Lion roars in the narrow antelope haunt of their heads.

There are mini-cities, Roman-arched and Bauhaused, in the shadow of the CBD, called Suntec City, Vivocity and Raffles City, the consumer spin-off of corporate spending. Here, leggy Chinese girls in ribbed jeans and discreet shoulder tattoos (scorpions, butterflies) drawn in henna, and phthysic Chinese boys with pierced ears and shocked blue hair ransack the designer shops and Gap franchises and nourish themselves on lattes in the Starbucks and Coffee Beans and Tea Leaves. Putting on our Aviator sunglasses and plunging into the broad whispering concourses of the Mass Rapid Transit, we head for Orchard Road and its bulging malls, our hearts beating, our fingers inter-linked, white over yellow, naturally blue-eyed and jut-jawed White Man with surgically-enhanced Singa Girl. Giant video screens show trailers from the latest Bond blockbuster or ads for holidays in New Zealand and Alaska. The clubs are brothel-red inside with strobes and vodka breezers and hiphop and trance. With opium unfashionable and cocaine-use inviting a whipping, the drug of choice is Red Bull and Panadol. The clientele, mostly white, spin like tops on the under-lit floors, while black marines terrify the Orient in the shadows.

Chewing gum is forbidden. Littering is forbidden. Anyone who spits or smokes in sight of the CCTV cameras will be incarcerated in Changi with the British ghosts, or deported to Indonesia. There is no racism. Quota systems are symbolic. Dogs don't defecate. No one has Aids. Mosquitoes have been vaporised. The air does not smell of overcooked cabbage and cat piss. Hygiene, heat-reflecting tinfoil hats and free speech are loudly encouraged. There is a Speaker's Corner where one may speak one's mind, provided one has a license, one is aged above 21, one is a property owner, one is in full possession of one's faculties and one is at one with the world.

Esmerelda is dusting the bookshelves, lifting out books by the armful, returning them the wrong way up, or in the wrong order. Cities are made of dreams, I tell her, and like dreams they are the end and the beginnings of our fears and hopes. If we are afraid of change or darkness or sorrow, the city will reflect this in its ordinances and regulations, its prisons and hospitals, its electricity grids and back-up generators. If we long for heaven and its gardens, the city will give us back parks, amusement arcades, malls, esplanades, great pleasure domes and stadia of light. I catch Esmerelda's arm and spin her round. Don't you see? I implore her. Look around you! What do you find here? She shakes her head. I have omitted to mention that Esmerelda is hard of hearing.

The Lion City’s second skin sometimes shows through in places, but is soon mummified with silicon laminate or cast in bronze for the tourists. Towkays and coolies stride eternally, artistically, under Kapital’s mausolia. The shophouses are double-glazed, retaining their colonial-era charisma, while the insides gleam with chrome and glass, doubling as boutique hotels and muscle gyms.There are enclaves of vegetation on Ann Siang hill, prettified and plaqued for the curious. The Merlion is the creature for which the city is named. It is half lion, half fish, and has the petulant features of a child deprived of a cookie. It stands at the mouth of the river facing seawards, spitting. People like to have themselves photographed with an arm round its neck. Fort Canning Park is a place of spirits, Malay ghosts walking through the oleanders with krisses gripped between their teeth. The Battle Box remembers the defeat of the British by the Japanese. It is made out of bones. Overlooked children howl in its stuffy innards. Nothing more is visible in the Autumn months because of the haze which is caused by the seasonal burning of forests in Borneo and Sumatra. Respiratory disease is common. Oxygen starvation is growing. The people on Orchard Road are staggering. They tumble and sprawl, their thin chests heaving.

Coughing, tearing, on my way back to Pagoda Street, dear Esmerelda, I saw people reeling about the piazzas and subways, tumbling with small barely audible screams. It could not be the haze, I thought, or bird flu, or a poison gas, as the city’s governors were always assiduous in anticipating calamity, and broadcasting the vaguest intimations of approaching peril on the sides of buildings, through TV or the MRT’s tannoy system and the city’s omnipresent plasma screens. It must be something invisibly ancient, a disease extruded through the city’s several skins that only attacked those whose roots reached deep down, through the planks, tattoos and slime. I came across a man with green hair, a bolt through his neck and orange reptilian eyes. I have an aversion to lunacy, or affectation. I barged into him, catching him off-balance, so that he fell under a passing truck. The truck jumped over him—the human body is remarkably solid—and shot into a crowd of gaping children, cutting a moist swathe, like a mower through young green grass.

And then it all vanished, before my very eyes, and I vanished too, before yours, my dear Esmerelda.


Esmerelda is not thunderstruck by these claims. She only titters, which is what she always does when she must broach an indelicate topic, and shakes a can of Vim in my direction, not it would seem in remonstrance. ‘Empty, sah!’ ‘Ok,’ I remark, ‘I will replace it.’ ‘Can have new gloves too, sah?’ she adds, now holding up two tattered yellow objects which appear to have seen better, much more elastic and wholesome days. ‘Yes, there will be a new pair awaiting when you come next.’ ‘Not good for cleaning toilet-bowl, sah.’ Another titter. ‘Quite.’ ‘Thank you, sah.’ This miserable exchange will have to do for a sample of our repartee, the whiz and crackle of our brilliancies. ‘There are cities, I tell her,’ as she ventures into the spare room, and retrieves the vacuum from its corner stall, ‘whose lustre and magnitude is largely a matter of rumour or trick photography. They exist, if at all, chiefly in hyperspace, as an arrangement of pixels or a rainbow cascade of digi—.' The rest of this utterance is drowned out by the dismal Horowitzian howl of the vacuum at work.

When next I alighted, it was on to the Arabian Gulf, amidst the floating spires, citadels and sweltering streets of the City of Creeps, once called al-Wasl. No one knows how the city arrived at this appellation, though it is put about that the word refers to the movement of water in the creek the city is built around rather than to the nature of the inhabitants—who are not, on the whole, invertebrate, or furtive, or unduly, unpleasantly complimentary. A case might be made for the noun’s subsidiary sense of parasitism, but that seems unfair on the ones who must live and work in the city and yet are not native to the place.

The City of Creeps is more fiction than fact. Its name implies base and bedrock, not superstructure or free-floating weightless ambition. For the city appears not to be earthbound, not to be down here, amongst us, so to speak; it defies, that is to say, its earthly roots (city comes from civitatem, Esmerelda, a Latin signifier meaning citizenship, whose own roots, returning to Greekish eponyms, denote homestead, the place where people lie down). It is more like a figment of the imagination (albeit a vulgar philistine imagination—that of one who has been brutalised and de-natured by reality TV, bling and other manifestations of the deity), a projection, a dream, a heavenly dwelling, than a real properly evolved place. It is material but not concrete. It sells itself. But it is unreal estate.

This city is money idealised, money stripped of exchange, currency, number, value, tang and biro scribbles in Arabic. It is money reified to the point of pure pullulant abstraction. As such, it is charismatic and highly marketable, like, well, like God. Perhaps that is why it is admired so much by the neighbours. Perhaps that is why celebrities from all the corners of the earth like to buy holiday homes on its islands and within its whirligig walls. Celebrity, my dear Esmerelda, is an effect of light. And light, as we know, attracts light. That is why, let’s face it, the universe is not dark. And that is why, inversely, wherever we find darkness we cannot find money or celebrity or God. This collocation is neither mischievous nor unreasonable.

I went into the Mother of Malls. (Everything in the City of Creeps is the ne plus ultra of everything everywhere else, my dear.) I saw designer shops thronged with Europeans, Americans, Singaporeans, Japanese, Chinese, Australians, Russians. I saw a ski slope entombed in glass, down which athletes in padded ski-jackets swooped, and over which shivering children in fur-lined anoraks clanked on a ski-lift. Keep in mind that outside, my dear Esmerelda, the temperature was over 40 degrees centigrade and the humidity count 98 per cent. I saw an avenue of camera and cell phone outlets. I saw camels with gold brocaded headdresses step lightly through the lumpen diners in a food court. I saw a hot-air balloon descend through a sliding panel in the roof. I saw roller-skaters and sword-swallowers, funambulists and robots. I saw men with computers strapped to their skulls. I saw temple dancers and fakirs. I saw a bungee jump stetched taut a thousand feet above a pool of jade, and a bear being baited in a pit. I saw a game-boy minotaur in a labyrinth, I saw oiled wrestlers throttling a multi-limbed plum-coloured alien. I saw the Devil, I saw the face of God. This is a city that knows no limits. As I passed through, I was reminded of a Quranic warning: ‘Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with ‘Ad—with Iram of the columns? —the like of which has not been created in the lands?’ On going to take possession of his earthly paradise, it is locally claimed, Shedad, son of ‘Ad, was struck dead by terrible noise from heaven. But then again, I reflected, this city is in the heavens. It is no terrestrial creation. It is a virtual Paradise. It is its own noise.

Who are the people who live here? How is the City of Creeps constructed? Let us answer these conundra, Esmerelda, by scrutinising the city as it passes overhead, arid and rocky, trailing ropes, fishing lines, cables, ducts, rubble and veils of dust, like a land Lemuel Gulliver might have travelled to, the sea following after, like a petrified splash, or a sheet of stiffened blue tarpaulin. The underside is composed of crumbling porous sandstone and stalactites, which have been formed out of the excrement of molluscs, compounded to a friable white stone. The topside is glass and breezeblock, marble and tarmacadam, date-palm and eucalyptus, sand and sea. The people who build the dreamy spires and colossal galleries are stunted hardy types from Kashmir and Nepal. They don’t get paid anything, they are content with their crusts of bread, tins of sardines and bottles of warm antiseptic cola. When they are not working, they sleep 25 to a room, just as they do in their own countries, which is therefore no hardship. When they are working, they wear their normal stained trousers and broken shoes, and swing like Himalayan langurs, from girder to girder, a paintbrush or rivet-gun between their uneven discoloured teeth. They long ago lost the habit of speech, communicating in hoots, whistles and moans.

Below them, in the glass tunnels that link each tower, translucent beings in silver suits and bejewelled sunglasses come and go, exchanging small talk about cold fusion, Banksy and organic rice. These are the tourists, the consumers, the easily appalled. The women have deep bronzed cleavages and spiral painted finger-nails. They vogue for cameras, any cameras, even the closed circuit TV ones, adopting expressions of violently abrupt happiness, or else they punish themselves with Nautilus machines and self-induced vomiting in the airborne toilets. They say ‘whatever’ a lot, and have affairs with cicatriced African warriors. The men are hollow. They are stitched together from hair implants, straw and glossy magazine covers. When they raise their heads from the glass tables you can see white foam seethe at their nostrils. They are very good at scuba-diving and baccarat.

The owners? you query. Ah, Esmerelda, the owners. The owners of the City of Creeps are even more fabulous beings, rarely seen outside their marmoreal desert retreats. They attire themselves in finely crafted spotless white dishdashas which appear to be watermarked with coronets and angels’ wings. They put on headdresses, whose peaked edges they contrive to make waviform. They will spend hours tweaking the troughs and crests into place. The ends of their agals hang down their backs like rodents’ tails. This is all they do each day. Sometimes they sigh into titanium-plated mobile phones. When they walk they exude a sort of musk which pervades the immediate atmosphere like an inert gas, silencing some, causing others to feel intrusive, tolerated, worthless. Their gait is measured and stately. They appear to have no emotions. The quick silvery laughter and the show of mild irritation at the tardy accumulation of the day’s profits are rare and untypical. They have no need of speech or bathrooms or food. When they stir a sandaled foot, it is said, even the sponges in the ocean look lively.

Esmerelda paces anxiously about. She seems lost in thought, no doubt overcome by the implications of my speech. Her empire is delimited by the walls of the rooms she sweeps and scrubs. She has little knowledge of the wider world, except what she can glean from the grunts of her companions, or the torn and stained pages of the Pondicherry Gazette that parcel the bundle of dried fish she gets from the Indian store in Hawally. She knows nothing of the world’s immense gulfs, between rich and richer, between white and whiter, between strong and stronger; her simple instincts are confined to the narrow straitened circumstance of apartments such as this and their grains of red dust. I await her rustic questions. Perhaps she wants me to tell her of the food they eat, of the opulent perpetually clean bathrooms and sitting rooms of the Tower of the Arabs? Perhaps she wants to ask about the spas and swimming pools. I am happy to oblige, to fill in another gap in the vast continental emptiness of her mind. I wait with a kindly encouraging expression playing lightly across my handsome Aryan features. I can see she is the throes of a decision. ‘Yes, my dear?’ She summons up all her courage, and says in a rush, ‘Can use house-phone, sah?’ ‘House-phone?’ I repeat. ‘Is that all you want?’ Her features writhe with apology. 'Well,' I say through tight lips. ‘You'd better help yourself.’

The Tower of the Arabs is designed to suggest a traditional ocean-going vessel, a dhow, say, or boom, in full sail.This effect is nicely ironised by the circular helicopter pad at the top and the fleet of limos at the entrance. The hotel stands—in dry-dock, as it were—on a man-made island, which is linked to the rest of the land satirical types call “Do Buy” by a causeway where honeymooners, dabbing the humidity away, pose for photographs. It is outside, looking up, that you have the sharpest and most lasting of epiphanies. Nothing is real; all is false, or false-bottomed, product of matter and mimesis. The world is a copy, a Platonic counterfeit, which has replaced the original. When you go into the Tower, my dear Esmerelda, it is as if you are entering the Arabian Dream: all the trappings of plush inlays, marble, thick-piled carpeting, bulbous columns, timed water-spouts, aquaria, figurines, mosaics, hundreds of pretty concierges from impoverished Asian countries. It makes Versailles or Blenheim Palace look shoddy and penny-pinched.

Sharp-suited men with Premier footballer haircuts approach on spongy sound-proofed shoes. They introduce themselves with sad knowing smiles and painless handshakes. They sit you down, amidst candelabra and potted plants, clapping for dates and cardomon coffee (a winning local touch), and then appear to interview you, in the confidential manner of a clinic for gentlemen with sexual problems or a gun-running outfit. When they’ve finished filling in their forms and offering murmured advice, another man, introducing himself as ‘Glen, your personal butler,’ keenly grasps your haversack, shrugging off your unthinking backwoodsman’s attempt to carry it yourself. You have the feeling he would like to pick you up too, bearing you aloft on shimmering dragonfly wings. The atrium opens above, limned in crimson and gold, with fairy lights winking around the glass capsules of the elevators. You ascend past familiar-looking people in linen suits and Versacci print dresses (didn't I see him on E-channel? isn't she..? no, surely not!) stepping in and out of the jewellery shops. Suddenly, you feel overwhelmed, not out of inadequacy or cloddishness. It is not a class thing. It is not even moral. It is matter of exaltation and its displacements.

‘For this is what you’ve been dreaming of. This is the acme of all that life has to offer. This is what you work for, Esmerelda, this is what you strive for, as you wield your bucket and mop. This is it, the Great End, the Point of It All.’ Esmerelda gapes up at me. There is a cord of drool playing from the corner of her mouth. I hand her a tissue. ‘This is what justifies all struggle, this is what validates the exertions of work, the callused palms, the broken nails, the backache and heatstroke. This is the glittering prize. Oh, it may come in different shapes, different smells, different costs—but however it comes, however humble or expensive it is, it always boils down to what is, essentially, absolutely, finally, nothing at all.' Esmerelda turns to one side, wiping away bubbles of snot. I see in her stooped resigned walk an allegory of our earthly passage. She returns with a dustpan and brush. ‘Can clean under desk, sah?’ ‘What?’ I regard her foolish benign features with a mixture of dismay and admiration. Esmerelda is stoical, a creature of almost superhuman courage and perseverance. ‘Of course, my dear child,’ I tell her, patting her tightly wound coconut-oiled topknot.

Esmerelda thrashes the sofa cushions, her tracksuit bottoms lifting with the effort of each blow, while the TV blares in the corner, advertising a fresh atrocity in Africa or Asia Minor. I approach on tiptoe—Esmerelda does not to like interruptions—a finger to my lips. ‘Cities are reservoirs,’ I tell her boomingly, aiming my words at her vermiform right ear, ‘of memory!’ ‘Aie!’ she screams back, in unrestrained delight. ‘They are the unconscious of the world, revealing in their shabby backstreets, bedraggled squares and rain-eroded columns the history of a people. The museums are the tarted up memory banks—they need not detain us—but the parks and gardens are the moments of recovery—from trauma, my dear, and fear of the unforgettable. Only consider the exhaust fume-blackened plane trees, the wilting violets, the old man alone on a wrought-iron bench, staring transfixed, not by the litter of used condoms and syringes, as you might expect, but by the pale leached sky.’ Esmerelda wields the carpet-beater, a wild look in her eye. ‘It is all right,’ I tell her gently, ‘we are the city’s narrators, not its dark uncertain narrative.’ Esmerelda makes a dash for the bathroom, and tries to lock herself in. ‘Diarrhoea?’ I ask kindly, hastening after. ‘I have Imodium, legacy of my recent voyage to Tibet, if you need it.’ I jam my toe in the door, forcing it ajar only a couple of inches. I am a man of sensibility. ‘The City of Creeps has no past,’ I declaim, to distract her. ‘It enshrines no ages of gold or even brass. Its people are temporary visitors. It has no past to recall in parades and demonstrations, posters and paintings; it is a place of surfaces, two-dimensional bliss. The City of Creeps is a zone of appetites, my dear Esmerelda, earthly hungers morphing, by a psychosis of loss and rootlessness, into ranting cosmic greed.’

‘During my stay in the Tower of the Arabs,’ I explain through the gap, ‘I several times noticed a Slav or Russian—he had that Eastern European look of sleek malevolence and suspect luxury and was coarsely voluble and loutish at the breakfast table. He had a gold earring inset with a ruby, Esmerelda, a gold necklace, chinking bracelets, and tiny pointed shoes made out of snakeskin. But what I noticed most—and I believe I was not alone in this—were the hefty pair of buttocks—larger I would argue than yours—and of which he seemed inordinately, if perversely, proud—that swayed behind him as he sauntered between the buffet tables. He wore a red thong, plainly visible through the thin fabric of his flannels. He had the habit of bending elaborately over the hot-trays and spearing lambs’ kidneys, calves’ livers and hogs’ testes in a way that seemed designed to draw attention to the protuberance and rotundity of his gluteai.’

‘He was accompanied by a sizeable square-jawed woman with thick chestnut-brown hair—possibly a wig—who monopolised the bacon-rashers and ham cuts, elbowing anyone else aside, should they attempt to capture a morsel or two for their own plate. Others had to stand by at the roast fowl counter while she piled twelve or more plates high with steaming turkey cuts, drumsticks, and other favoured portions, few of a lean or nutritious quality. Then, with an imperious bark, she would direct the waiters to convey the heaving platter to her table. She would sit down, rolling up her sleeves, napkin tucked into the neck of her blouse and work her way through it all, the small muscles in her shoulders jumping at each lunge of fork or knife. She gave no signs of enjoyment, merely uttering a hoarse grunt whenever her companion delivered a stream of invective or a brutal oath. On the other side of the window, I noticed half a dozen skinny Nepalis, drowning in the hotel’s royal blue livery, who would break off from raking the soft white sands to gape as she sucked the thick orange-trimmed white fat off the slices of ham she carried whole to her mouth.

‘It was clear to me that something would have to be done about these two. I conceived a plan, Esmerelda, of an ingenious and, if I may say so, felicitous and witty nature. What I would do to them would be done in such a way as to compensate the woman for the years of abuse she had endured at the hands of the man. I am a humanitarian at heart, Esmerelda, as you must have realised by now, and am conscious of the intersection of class and gender in all forms of oppression. In essence, my plan involved feeding the man’s plump buttocks to the woman. How, what, why, I hear you cry? Hatred is like love; unrequited, it leads to sleepless nights, black engulphing despair, and bad poetry. To be alleviated, it must be consummated. I am a resourceful man, impudent and bold. I disguised myself as one of the hotel cooks, enticing the Slav pervert into the dimly lit recesses of the kitchens (I used a bait of succulent animal organs, anointed with cranberry jam and sour cream), when the other cooks were preoccupied with the salads and tropical fruits, and sharply despatched him in the darkness of the pantry. I am a dab hand with a bone-saw. It was a matter of a moment to carve off his rump, wash off the blood, put it through the salami slicer—you should have seen the beautiful opalescent shavings, dear Esmerelda, like mother of pearl—and fry the slices up in butter on one of the hotplates. These I substituted for a tray of ordinary rashers, knowing that the ogress would certainly get hold of them before anyone else. Are you all right in there, my dear?

‘What was left of the Russian gangster I beheaded and lopped free of limbs, before leaving it cocooned in butcher’s gauze in cold storage. I fancy I did a pretty thorough job. I had never gutted a human before, but I can assure you, Esmerelda, it is surprisingly easy. You just grab a handful of glossy purple intestine—initially rather slimy to the touch, and flocculent, like the feel you might associate with that drainage hole you are attempting to unblock, and yank.—Are you well, Esmerelda? You sound as if you are retching. The odour of drains can be stomach-turning, I grant you. Pinch your nostrils together, or insert twists of tissue into each. Anyway, the best part was watching the monster’s better half, if that was what she was, gobbling her plate of gleaming coiled rashers. As she munched, crunching on the scorched rind, she seemed happy, glowing, I thought, as if with an inner radiance.’

In the role of Lord High Admiral, James Stuart, Duke of York and Albany, gave his name—or handle—to the city towards which the world (and this tale) presently tends. He never visited it. Instead, he spent his time ogling Queen Catherine’s maids of honour, debauching most, before converting to Catholicism, and becoming, on the advice of God and the death of his brother Charles, an absolute monarch and champion of Catholic pleaders. (England, you should know, my dear Esmerelda, was at that time officially a Protestant country whose king or queen must be defender of the faith, not the willing subject of papal frottering.) Amongst the new king’s most infamous appointments was Judge Jeffries—he of the ‘Bloody Assizes,’ in which Protestant rebels were tortured, enslaved or beheaded in fantastic numbers. Such outrageous turns or snubs to people and polity could not last; the upper classes conspired with James’ Protestant daughter Ann and her Dutch husband, the engagingly named William of Orange, to usher in the Glorious Revolution. This led to the establishment of the supremacy of an elected parliament, a situation that would prevail in time throughout the rest of Western Europe and the emerging Free World. James fled to Ireland pursued by the Orangemen, an erratic relocation which resulted in another lamentable episode in modern history (you will know it, litotically, as the Troubles, my dear Esmerelda, if you know anything at all). Fearful of William’s bugaboo army, James very soon fled Ireland—his Irish supporters referred to him as James the Beshitten—for France, where he languished in a state of bewilderment and hyperstheniac penitence before dying of a brain haemorrhage. What a man! Few can claim to have caused so much to happen to so many in so short a time. The old rogue was the founding father of what is now known as modern civilisation.

James’ eponymous town looked more like a Hollywood blockbuster setting—a series of gleaming glass turrets in the slanting rays of the sun, awaiting a computer-generated giant wave or shower of meteors of immense size—than the stately minster I had expected, as my craft swung to starboard, bisecting a lacy cloud. The gleaming white airport was bizarrely situated amongst broken-down clapperboard dwellings inhabited by poor black men with strange ice-coloured irises and stiff-legged walks. It was like a clip from a zombie film. But the freeway soon left all that behind, rising in a generous parabola to reveal a vista of crystal structures, more fabulous from below than those I had seen from above. ‘Look!’ I told the taxi driver. ‘Look at that!’ He didn’t seem as impressed, merely contemplating me through the rear-view mirror for a while, with a dramatically arched eyebrow. Freeways now met freeways, the city rose between, like expensively whitened teeth from blackened and withered gums.

Esmerelda tackles the windows with an orange rag and Dac glass cleaning fluid. She perches on the sill on one knee, reaching round the sliding panes, while her left hand, or right hand, depending on which direction the pane slides, describes ever more widening circles. The other hand grips the window frames, the knuckles flexing under the strain. At times, hearing her shriek fearfully, I assist by holding on to her ankles. Neither of us would like her to plummet several storeys into the date-palms below. There is every chance a falling body would miss the fronds altogether, hitting the concrete decking beneath them at speed. I have pointed this out to her. But she is deaf to my warnings, or nerveless and unstinting in her quest for job-satisfaction.

‘Not only do cities embody human hopes and memories,’ I tell her, as she leans out perilously, striving to reach the upper right-hand corner of the glass with her rag, ‘they also entomb fantasy, imaginative excess, the leakage of the aspirant mind. In the main thoroughfares and civic centres, in the statues and squares, in the art galleries and libraries, there is a lure, a distraction, an abomination. And yet this thing, this ce la, to use a fashionable French term, is only there by virtue of what we, in our innocence or despair, long for. It is the endlessly escaping, endlessly ramifying secret that motivates, sustains and frustrates our lives. If I say “New York” to you I am sure that you will immediately imagine something far in excess of anything I might in turn imagine or communicate to you, something before which even language falters. Am I right?’ Esmerelda’s back tenses, her hand slips, she utters a squeal. I divine instantly that this is no concurring yell. I wrap my arms round her legs, as she tilts and lurches into the void. Her upper half swings out of the window. Somewhere far below, I hear the fat thud of the plastic bottle of Dac’s cleaning fluid. My eyeballs bulge. Esmerelda is far weightier than I had anticipated. ‘Hang on,’ I gasp. I brace myself, putting one foot against the wall. ‘I all right, sah!’ Esmerelda protests. I see her peering face above me. ‘Nonsense,’ I tell it, 'I'll have you inside in a jiffy!' I heave her back into the room, but as I do my foot becomes entangled with a chair-leg, and I trip, collapsing backwards with outflung arms. Esmerelda comes down on top of me, the orange rag and Esmerelda's fingers inadvertently thrust into my mouth. It is as if I have attempted to catch a grand piano. All the wind is knocked out of me. The rag tastes of turpentine.