Yellow.  That was the most disturbing thing about Bill and Ramona’s house.  Everything was yellow.  Yellow kitchen, yellow sitting room, yellow dining room, yellow bedrooms and yellow bathroom.  It’s such a dark house said Ramona, I want to bring some sunshine into it.  Why not lose the roof then, I said, corrugated perspex would keep the rain out just as well.  She gave me that look.  The look she’d been giving me ever since our first week at UEA.

Some houses are dark because there aren’t enough windows, or maybe the windows face the wrong way.  Others have darkness etched into their very fabric.  The weight of the years.  Deaths, still-births, arguments, beatings, hunger.  And silence.  Endless, despairing silence.  She gave me the look when I said that too.  But she still kept on having me round to dinner.   Every Sunday evening, ever since we both moved to London.  My oldest friend.  And Bill?  He was her husband and my second closest friend but, for me, it was never quite the same as the friendship I forged with Ramona at Uni.  All those late nights over cider and philosophy.  Bill.  He was a newcomer.  He didn’t appear on the scene until our third year; a post-grad student.  And then she married him.

The best thing about dinner at Bill and Ramona’s was the walk.  I always walked, there and back again.  No matter what the weather or how potent the wine, I walked.  Out onto Fieldgate Street and through New Road then onto Whitechapel High Street.  Then up Cambridge Heath Road, past Bethnal Green tube station, and on to Hackney.  Vicky Park Road, to be precise.

If you listen very carefully you can hear the heartbeat of the city.  Its pulse.  It fibrillates, but never ceases.  The Romans heard it, in their first settlement on the muddy north bank of the Thames. It pulsed in the stones of their temples.  Hawksmoor heard it too; his stones were chipped and hammered to its beat.  London has two faces.  One beast with two faces, each pretending it knows nothing of the other.  One of them faces west, raising its snout to breathe in clean air and light.  It gazes westwards towards the downs and the source of the Thames and, beyond the ocean, to America.  The other London turns its maws to the East and sucks in, has always sucked in, new people and new wealth.  And the effluent of human lives it pumps back out again, flowing away with the muddy Thames.