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clenched in pleasure. Where was he?
    He was in Oxford Circus, standing outside Top Shop sucking on an unfiltered Camel, looking across the arena of tar towards the reef of Regent Street, which curved away to the south. He was standing back from the pavement, against the plate-glass window. His temples thrummed and he felt claustrophobic. The tube had been bad enough, had been, in two words, a mistake. Or rather the joint he had smoked in Sloane Square before getting the tube had been a mistake. He had hoped for a little respite from his body, a mental excursion whilst it was transported into the West End. But instead the hash with its heavy predictability, like a bulky butler, ushered in more unpleasantness, more bad feeling.
    It began on the escalator down, which was packed with a commuter crowd. I have been looking at these descending ranks of people all my life, it occurred to Simon, robotic, not touching, but moving in tight formations along tunnels and up stairways. They are like the proles in Lang’s
Metropolis
. Exactly like the proles in Lang’s
Metropolis. This
glancing observation, quite slight, nonetheless pulled up a deeper memory, depth-charged it, so that it shot up into Simon’s consciousness streaming bubbles. He had seen
Metropolis
as a child, been appalled by Lang’s vision of an inhuman, urban future, ruled by the Moloch of machinery, but had not, aged seven, seen it as dark fantasy at all. Simon thought it was a documentary – of sorts.
    And it had been. A fly-on-the-tube-wall report of shuffling anonymity, every body reduced by the Frankensteinian future to no more than the sum ofits fellows’ parts. And by the vending machine Simon blanched, and under the train indicator Simon sweated; he felt the ridging of sweaty cloth cut into his perineum –
visceralupdateviscera-lupdatevisceralupdate.
    He had also lied to the woman at the opening, the pushy hack from
Contemporanea.
It wasn’t true about the forthcoming exhibition of his work. It wasn’t true about his love affair with the human body. He hadn’t painted pictures that displayed the ideal couched within the real flesh, the real bone, the real blood. He had painted the unreal, the twisting and distressing of that body by the metropolis, by its trains and planes, its offices and apartments, its fashions and fascisms, piazzas and pizza parlours.
    A year or so before, in the dark age between Jean and Sarah, Simon had lunched one day with George Levinson at the Arts Club and then sliced his way down through the cake-and-icing streets of Chelsea to the Tate. He knew why. He was blocked again, badly blocked. He not only didn’t want to paint, or draw, or construct, or carve. He felt like some frontal-lobe fuck-up, incapable of remembering why it was that anyone should paint, or draw, or construct,or carve. The world seemed replete with its own imagery already – too like
itself
already. In this mood he forced himself in the direction of the gallery, urging one foot in front of the other. He had arrived for lunch stoned, and left drunk.
    The visit to the Tate was a bit of masochism for Simon. Worse than that – a failed bit of masochism. Simon felt himself to be a middle-aged JP with a taste for birching, picking up a boy in the Charing Cross Road with the sure knowledge that his money will be taken by the pimp, and that the police will pass him on to the tabloids.
    He scuttled up the wide stone stairs and entered crabwise, skirting the main hall, ducking past the arch leading to the contemporary galleries, eyes averted, lest he catch sight of one of his peer’s works, or worse, one of his own. He escaped into the Renaissance and hung out there a while, feeding deer and goats in the blue distance of Umbrian panelling. It meant nothing to him, the colours, the positioning of figures, the lines of sight, the religious iconography. Every aspect of the paintings he stared at had been traduced and traduced and