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So I’m sat here at my desk, it’s long after midnight, and a large cavern of scary darkness seems to be gradually opening up beneath me. And it’s not the sort of cavern where the Beatles used to play, and it’s not the sort of darkness that ponces about in spandex. My immediate response is to greet it with some crazy shit of my own in the hope that it might get scared.
The story goes that there’s an office building in Bloomsbury that houses a clandestine offshoot of the secret service known as the Pearly Kings & Queens. The building itself is fairly non-descript and blends in with any number of drab and dreary concrete slabs in the sour wasteland between Oxford Street and Holborn. If you were of a mind to eavesdrop, you could put a glass to the door and not be at all surprised by the muffled clacking and dull muttering that you might hear. It wouldn’t be too difficult to imagine a handful of fish-eyed men in untidy suits tapping away at dirty keyboards, swapping last month’s chain e-mails, and fantasising about the receptionist. Just a few more square feet of open-plan anonymity. Move along please, nothing to see here.
Easy to imagine, but way off the mark. What goes on in there is a whole different kind of deal. You might have seen one or two Pearly Kings or Queens out and about in the East End. Just one of them funny London traditions isn’t it, like Chelsea Pensioners and Jellied Eels. There isn’t anything sinister about it, and of course you haven’t looked closely at their costumes. It’s just daft sequins and sewn-on buttons. It’s all just a bit of laugh, I don’t really understand it myself, but it takes all sorts doesn’t it. And that’s how we never see them coming.
They like to hunt in the East End. It’s always been their manor. Somewhere that they’re guaranteed to get a steady supply of the type of merchandise that interests them. When they go out fishing, Stepney looks the other way and Hackney holds its breath. They harvest pieces, you see. Intricate little things that you never thought you’d miss. Tiny spaces of life that stick everything else together, five minutes here and a phone call there. A cup of tea and a kiss goodnight, a walk home in the rain, a trip to the shops on a Saturday afternoon. They take them, and we pretend it isn’t happening.
When they’ve had their fill, they parade up High Holborn. It’s one of their processional routes. Arm in arm, hats tipped at a jaunty angle and a swagger in their step. Like the Lambeth walk, gone horribly wrong. Marching over London tarmac back to their offices. Back to Bloomsbury, where the stitching is done.
Everything begins and ends in Bloomsbury. Behind locked doors, they roll out the barrel. Empty out their evenings haul onto beige carpets and divide up their lovely plunder beneath unkind strip lights. They like to take turns to process their takings. Putting your precious merchandise through their contraptions. An endless conveyor belt of awful devices that don’t seem to make any sense, horrible cogs battering and condensing and making it all much smaller than it was, the whole room filled with the deafening chatter of ghostly sewing machines hammering a new cruel miniature world into shape.
When they’re done, they pluck what’s left out of their apparatus, polish it up with a bit of elbow grease, and stitch it onto their clothes. Just another sad trinket among hundreds, the tawdry pearls on their costumes that nobody really looks at. Just another of them funny London traditions. Everything that you ever treasured, pinned on to an idiot’s chest and paraded through town. |
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