Sex in the City--London, Volume One by Maxim Jakubowski

Author:Maxim Jakubowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Xcite Books
Published: 2011-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

About the Story

ONE OF MY MOST vivid childhood memories is of looking up at the Houses of Parliament while Big Ben chimed the hour during a dramatic summer thunderstorm. I was seven years old, soaking wet, and filled with an exhilarating sense of being at the living heart of all things. My obsession with London was born then, on my first visit to the city, so I was fascinated and excited to hear about this anthology.

I made it an ambition to live and work in London, and managed to fulfil this earlier than I expected – at the age of ten – when my father’s job stationed him on the north-western fringes of the metropolis. I moved away, came back, moved away, but was always drawn back by the magnetic attraction London has for me.

My story in this collection, Thames Link, has its basis in truth. For a time, I was that girl in the eau-de-nil cotton dress (from Marks and Spencer, if you’re interested) on the station platform, and there was indeed an odd stalkerish character, wearing a lightweight raincoat at the height of summer, who possessed a paranormal ability to find the seat nearest to me on the train. Everything thereafter is fiction but, for a long time, I have wondered how that scenario might have eventually played out, had I not moved from that particular suburb and abandoned my Thameslink commute.

I will never know, which is almost certainly for the best. The likelihood of it ending badly, or dully, or frighteningly is pretty high. In my mind, though, I can pretend it ended erotically, which is always the best way.

The part of the story where Jane imagines the ghosts of a former London trysting at Blackfriars reminds me of the endless stories that ran through my head when I lived there. I could not walk from shop to pub to tube station without thinking of all the things that had happened on that soil before – violent things, romantic things, tragic things, epoch-making things. In the end it was rather overwhelming and I fled to the country. Away from London, my head is less crowded, but I love to return when the cranium starts to rattle and fill it up all over again.

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