What's up Dock

Streetgeezer called in empty outside the Britannia Hotel in Marsh Wall, Isle of Dogs. The controller informed him that a Miss Downs of Brighton-Earleigh had requested him at the City Airport in two hours time and it would be sensible if he were to wait. He drove east along Marsh Wall, through canyons of concrete and glass: a green block dedicated to Midland Bank; a blue one dedicated to visual variety. By brutal modernity and antiquated sailing barges permanently moored in the old docks, he crossed the bridge on Marsh Wall. Looking at the docks to his right to see restaurants that looked like boats, he noted how they matched the boats that had become restaurants. Overhead ran the red, white and blue trains of the Docklands Light Railway pausing at their elevated stations. He crossed the famous blue cantilever bridge and drove to McDonalds in Billingsgate, named after the nearby fish market that had retained its name, though it was no longer in Billingsgate.

The tea in McDonalds tasted more of the polystyrene cup then it did of the unenthusiastic pouch of leaves failing to enthuse in insufficiently warm water. He squeezed it with the curious plastic stick supplied. It would take all the bag had to offer to make just the slightest dent in his craving. He could feel he had just too much blood in his tannin stream. He bit, without relish into a hamburger without relish, and regretted the sweetness of the bun. He had been informed by a McDonalds employee that the sugar in the bun was present not for taste but so, when toasted it would caramelise and keep the burgers warm for longer. This allowed them to stand for longer and meant fewer had to be thrown away. But, when you've time to kill on the Isle of Dogs there is no other option.

As the tea did little more than warm the inside of his mouth so his thoughts turned to his pick up. He had known Miss Downs for over a decade and though their meetings had become increasingly infrequent he felt no panic that they could ever be strangers. He had witnessed her transformation from the uncontrolled wildness of her late adolescence, through years of study to her current well-respected position in a top accountancy firm.


Brighton Earleigh were major customers of the firm Streetgeezer worked for and knowing their modus operandi as he did it was all the more surprising that his friend should work for them. She was once the most spirited, most individual individual he knew and yet Brighton Earleigh were the most corporately aware company he had ever encountered. He had once picked some Brighton Earleigh staff up from a party. During the journey he overheard them commenting of their host, that he would have to find better friends then the ones on display at the party, if he wanted to get on. On another occasion two managers were discussing a third. It was in their opinion a pity that he would never be a partner just because he was a socialist. The training manager of B-H was once heard by Streetgeezer to boast that it had taken her a remarkably short time to Brightonise her latest intake. To Brightonise apparently meant to clone, to churn out identikit company men all looking the same, all having the same taste and all dedicated to the company. A secretary once told Streetgeezer how her boss came to work the day his father died.

'How sad.' Had been the driver's reaction.
'Well he had to, there was no-one else who could take the meeting.' She'd replied instinctively.
'No you don't understand, how could anything Brighton Earleigh do be more important than a man spending such an occasion with his family.'
'My God!' She exclaimed. 'I'm thinking like them as well as dressing like them, I must get out while I still have a personality of my own!'

Whenever Streetgeezer confronted his friend with these stories she would tell him that her department was not like that. She would boast how they laughed at the other automatons for they were the young bucks of accounting.

He once heard an accountant tell his friends how, while at college he would dream in double entry but then wake up in a panic as he realised that in the real world things don't always add up.

With an hour until the flight was due Streetgeezer returned to the car and drove off towards the airport. Decorating the first roundabout stood a metal sculpture of a person of indeterminate gender with two dimensional limbs. To the driver approaching from Billingsgate it suddenly becomes apparent in the corner of the eye diverting his attention from the road and causing the "What the fuck was that!!" reaction.

Streetgeezer however, knew it was there as he also half expected the smell that had blown up from the works on the south of the river where it was a permanent stench. He crossed the river Lea. All around was water, cranes, demolition and development. Up on Silvertown Way looking out over the docks, now a water sports centre, he noted rows of derricks with no chains or hooks standing like death's pet grey flamingos, guarding ghostly wharves with small boats bobbing in the water. The first Tate and Lyle building appeared on his left and boasted of its centenary some years previously.

The surrounding desolation became familiar as the TV badlands; the waste ground where car chases end in a shoot out and the brave fire fighters of blue watch perform daring rescues from warehouses.

Within sight of an angular Anglican church and a Tate and Lyle factory sprouting pipes and chimneys and taking itself very seriously; and next to a Victorian Boys' School, the blue simplicity of the airport terminal fitted in perfectly with the incongruity of it all.

Streetgeezer checked the flight arrival time. While he waited he gazed out through the glass side wall at the runway, the docks and the empty fields beyond. In the middle distance the A13 and the Beckton Alps looked over boarded-up buildings awaiting the bulldozer.

He watched the light in the sky come closer. He saw it land and ten minutes later she came through the doors into the hall.

She wore a smart blue suit with a short skirt, high heels and black tights. Streetgeezer wondered how much longer he would have to suffer this tantalising fashion. To make things worse he remembered that she always used to wear stockings.

Her flowing hair, that once complimented her face to make her almost intolerably pretty, was now pinned up to give full effect to the attractive though slightly bland corporate mask she had fabricated.

She carried the pilot case in one hand, the Samsonite in the other. He offered to take one as she offered her cheek for the peck that was destined not to make contact.

'I nearly didn't recognise you, you all look so similar.' He joked.
'Yes sometimes even I forget which one I am.' She smiled as she beat him to the punch line.
They walked to the car making the usual comparisons between the weather here and the weather there. As she sat on the front seat he could not be sure that it wasn't on purpose that she put herself in such a position that he could see her suspender belt. Was it his age or was it the spirit of a time of pointless change that cheered him to see her maintaining part of her old self?

'I must show you something.' He enthused as he turned right onto the raisable bridge where a glass crow's nest stands on a concrete mast presumably for the man who does the raising though raising is seldom done. The lights of the runway to the right glittered like 1972 as they turned left by a pub and he pointed to a restored Clochemerle-style outside urinal.

'It makes a change to see they are not taking the pissoir!' He joked like a Sun headline. She groaned appropriately.
'Can we drive past the Financial Times?' She requested.
The sky was now dark and the illuminated pyramid at the top of the Canary Tower appeared to be billowing smoke as clouds drifted around and enveloped its pinnacle. Streetgeezer told her how in the fresh light of dawn refraction causes each side to take on a different colour, though not the bright colours of the rainbow but more the muted colours seen in an oily puddle.

They reached the Canning Town flyover joining the A13, passing the giant clear glass front of the Financial Times building and glancing at the machinery churning out tomorrow's news.

Back onto the Island and through the Limehouse link tunnel, they ejaculated into Wapping. Haring along the Highway, ignoring the Tower and Tower Bridge bathed painfully in floodlights they commended the cheering sight of the fairground lights and blue cranes that top the eccentricity of the Lloyds Building visible on the skyline.

They discussed her thesis which concluded that all human ventures are made unnecessarily complicated because of the inherent dishonesty of the race.
'We lie, cheat and steal from infancy to adultery.' had been her conclusion.

She told him how she planned to go back to the world of academia and research in statistics as they followed the river west. He muttered a tired cliché about lies and damned lies, though noone to the best of his knowledge had ever defined the difference. Expressing impatience with such lines of thought, she lectured on the subject losing his understanding but gripping his attention. He listened as he would have listened to an Italian libretto or the shipping forecast. He made no attempt to understand. He only wallowed in the sound, appreciating the timbre of her refined voice, the rhythm of her phrasing, the poetry of her jargon.


By the time they reached the Chelsea embankment she had admitted the frustration of not being able to read the Guardian at work. As the suspension towers and wires of Chelsea bridge flashed by she admitted the frustration of working with people who have only ever been accountants. He listened as he glanced to the South Bank, taking in the sad relic of Battersea's onetime cathedral of power and the riverside pagoda. As the Albert Bridge loomed like a giant candle lit birthday cake she bemoaned the problem with having original ideas in an environment that demands adherence to convention. She even admitted that she sometimes questioned the validity of accountancy. They stopped at the lights and both expressed a fondness for the statue of a boy flying through the air holding the fin of a leaping dolphin (David Wynne 1975). Her admissions of contemplative treachery reminded him of secret rebellions at school. They had worn badges on the underside of the lapels of their uniform blazers: Marijuana leaves or CND emblems. He knew her bosses would have had no idea she wore suspenders.

Shepherds Bush