Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson Page B

about it than our minders had intended. Meditating on which bridge to cross, the driver took the opportunity to enquire if we were certain that the Flood Barrier was where we wanted to go, since at this time of night there mightn’t be much doing out there. We reassured him and he drove patiently on, identifying for us the impressive riverside buildings when at last we reached them. In time we left Southwark behind, and Bermondsey and Deptford. A sign to Greenwich looked promising, but stylish Greenwich wasn’t for us. We’d been on the road for more than an hour when we turned out of the traffic, into docklands that for the most part were pitch-dark.
    ‘Well, now you’ve got me,’ the taxi-driver confessed, his headlights sweeping over a vast concrete nowhere, roadless and signless. ‘I have a telephone number,’ the young man said.
    As he spoke, two figures were suddenly lit up, gazing at our approach. They were schoolgirls, who asked us when we stopped if we were Gilbert and George. We said we weren’t and they despondently wandered off into the dark again.
    We drove on, windows down, all of us peering out. ‘That could be a telephone box,’ someone said, and it was. We drew up beside it and watched the young man prodding in his number and then waiting to be answered. We heard a very faint ringing that ceased when he put the receiver down. We passed this on to him when he returned to the taxi and he hammered on the door of what in the glow from the telephone-box appeared to be a shed. Nothing happened, so we all got out except the taxi-driver.
    A touch of fog had developed and we made our way cautiously through it, aware of architectural shapes that were not quite buildings, and of silence and the rawness of the air. As we turned to go back to the taxi, shadows moved in the far distance and, while we watched, three tall men materialized. They were carrying soundboxes and other electrical equipment; behind them there was a woman with two plates of sandwiches. Someone had seen a car driving about, she said.
    We followed them and the taxi followed us. The doors of a building that had eluded us before were unlocked, lights came on and we went in. Chairs were arranged in rows but no one was sitting on them. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ the taxi-driver wanted to know, keen for more adventure. He was surprised when I said I was going to read a story but, obliging as ever, he sat down in the front row with some of the sandwiches. Then a boy and his father joined him. Reading it, I made the story rather shorter than it was.
    As we passed the schoolgirls on our way back to central London we offered them a lift but they were suspicious and refused. Gilbert and George hadn’t felt like performing artistically in a waterworks was what they reckoned, and said with some feeling that they didn’t blame them.
    The taxi-driver drew up in Wigmore Street, where the young man visited a hole-in-the-wall before attempting to settle the taxi bill. ‘Come in and have a drink,’ I invited him and the Arts Council lady when we reached Durrant’s Hotel. I invited the taxi-driver too because he’d been so nice, but he said he’d better not. I signed the story I’d read and gave it to him instead.
    Over drinks, I dismissed what signs there were that apologies might be in order. Blame does not belong when the circumstances are flawed and in the warm, snug bar it seemed neither here nor there that twenty-four hours hadn’t been time enough to spread the word of a forthcoming event; neither here nor there that the docklands at night were perhaps not quite the place for Gilbert and George’s subtleties. As for us, our evening out couldn’t be decribed as anything less than grist to the fiction-writer’s mill; and more enjoyable – although I didn’t say it – than the tedium of what might have been.

“The critic’s pretence that he can unravel the procedure is grotesque. As well hope to start with a string of sausages and