“Look, what a big cat.”
“That's not a cat, it's a fox.”
“A fox!” cried Trandi Romantic. “In the middle of London?”
“Can't think of any other city to see wildlife jumping about,” Ferry Wowy responded rather pedantic. Despite the wonderful weather, he was feeling uncomfortable. In a shoe shop where Trandi had scored a pair of green sandals the shop assistant, a tall black guy in 1970s New York soul flares, had called him boss and Ferry didn't know what to think of it. Was it a regular greet, much like the word rey the shopkeepers in his neighbourhood back home addressed him with, or was he supposed to sense his skin’s apparently inappropriate whiteness? Wowy liked to think he sufficiently possessed the colour blindness required to participate in modern British society, sitting next a stranger on the bus and making small talk in the supermarket, the easy stuff. What he couldn't control though was how other people thought of him. He had vainly wanted to gain back ground but the assistant wasn't interested of course, giving his attention to Trandi.
From the pleasant bed & breakfast they were staying at they'd set out on a walk through the endless suburban sprawl the English capital essentially consisted of. They were looking for an ancient pyramid and so far Ferry, their household's expert in geographical matters, hadn't come upon any clue as to where the damned thing might be located. They had wanted to go to Egypt that year but deemed it poor timing and then Trandi on a Sunday morning read this article about how at least one and perhaps more pyramids had been shipped from the Egyptian desert to the capital of empire in the days the English were still busy filling their museums. Let's check out those ones instead, she'd suggested.
“Should we go to the British Museum, then? That's where they keep the loot, isn't it?”
“As big as it is, I don't think it fits a full sized pyramid.”
They were going by main streets and county lanes, along greens and public gardens, under railway bridges past stalled development, amazed at how 19th century many places looked and how big the city had already been when most European towns were still in the process of shaking off their medieval walls. So many faces and cultures, so many styles and influences, so many boots 'n' bags. Trandi Romantic marvelled in the continuously changing mix on the tiny streets of this never ending village. She was running in and out of shops, spotting, contemplating, bartering, purchasing, a growing smile on her face and her eyes shiny with ideas. Wowy dutifully carried the bags, trying to subdue those feelings of defeat and unrest by feeding on some of his companion's enthusiasm.
“They could have built it all a bit denser,” he opined, having lost count of the number of corners taken, crossings crossed, pubs not entered and intersections put behind them. “Look at our dirty town, if you stack people ten floors up and forget about parks and open spaces, you'll keep most of the sights within walking distance.”
“Isn't that the charm of this city,” believed Trandi Romantic, she herself native to their cramped county town.
“It's not always sunny summer in these parts,” Ferry Wowy warned. Being from a similar altitude, he had recognised the smell of changeable Atlantic weather as soon as they'd set foot ashore and was wary of sudden showers forcing them onto a crowded underground train.
They had been rummaging about a neighbourhood supposed to be the hip spot on their quarter of the globe and were now entering shadier surroundings, passing the tiny statue of a winged dragon on a column. In a boisterous manner, the creature had one paw placed on a white shield bearing an upside down red cross, the other defiantly raised in defence and attack.
“That must be Saint George's coat,” Wowy noted, “but where is our hero?”
In their home town's legendry the faithful warrior slays the beast to secure the Lord's reign on Earth, but here it seemed the famed battle had gone a rather different course.
“Just look at the little gaffer smirking, what's he up to, you'd think?”
“This is where the City begins,” Trandi said, nodding further down the street where recently erected high risers cast dark money-shaped shadows over earlier age office buildings. She told the square mile City wasn't really a part of England. It had its own established rules and only subjected to the laws of finance.
“Hence the turned over cross and the mocking grin,” Ferry appreciated.
They came to narrow, dark streets which hadn't much more to offer than snack food chains and strings of young men in grey pants and white buttoned-up shirts, all neatly groomed in whatever the proper manner was in these quarters. It reminded Ferry Wowy of scenes he had witnessed many years ago of similarly uniformed young people who thought highly of themselves for no other reason than their being the elite party's foot soldiers (the only difference perhaps that in those days they were almost exclusively white male, while now and here a sizeable portion were female and/or with unbleached skin), and it was the time distance which depressed him mostly. So many years passed and so little gained, if anything.
“Couldn't they at least have laid it out a tad spacier when they rebuilt the old town?” Wowy having done his bit of their pre-travel homework, he told Trandi of the great fire which had consumed most of the city in the year 666 of the second Christian millennium, offering the opportunity to build in stone instead of wood and drive out the poor in the process. The Lord Mayor lacking the managerial qualities to immediately respond when strong easterly winds began blazing the initial flames from house to house and street to street, or so the story went, had certainly proved of convenience.
Coming out at the square mile's other end, the same winged reptilian, on a statelier column this time, waved them away. Good riddance, the beast seemed to say and the subterranean traveller could certainly agree with that. They were now in Westminster, home to the empire's political power and the grand show of democracy.
“I wonder,” Trandi remarked, “what's the use of having parliamentary oversight when high finance is out of your control and money, after all, is what makes the world go round?”
“I guess they thought it not of dire need in order to bedevil the masses,” Ferry offered.
They walked along broader lanes aligned with well-kept patrician buildings, home to solicitors’ practices and embassies and the odd estate agency. At an art gallery they learned Ron Wood's fine paintings of his fellow Stones were trading for up to a quarter million pounds and they had a jolly good time noticing everything they came upon. Wowy by now was fine again with where he was put on planet Earth, meaning it was of no importance to how he saw himself.
“Are you quite sure about those pyramids?” he asked when they went underground for the long ride back to bed & breakfast. “Are we talking established information?”
“Actually, I found it on one of your favourite illuminati websites,” countered Trandi Romantic.
“So it might as well be a secret pyramid,” Ferry Wowy concluded, “an invisible one, a metaphorical one.”
“Anything square and powerful, you'd say?” smiled Trandi.
