London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  And then Yoyo phoned to tell me that Saskia had been found dead on the Fulham Palace Road, hit by a car as she was crossing with an arm full of new toys for a baby that would never know what play meant.

  Chapter 8

  Cataplexy

  ‘There are many things that can cause it, Adam,’ Dr Ferguson said. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  The cramped GP’s surgery was filled with cigarette smoke. He liked a crafty drag in between the sore throats and pulled muscles and unmentionables.

  ‘Laughter. Resisting an attack of sleep. Yawning. Sexual intercourse. Attempting to join in with a bit of banter, even.’

  ‘I know what causes it,’ I said, trying to not sound spiky. ‘I’m, like, you know, there at the time.’

  Fergie smiled and scratched something with his pen on a pad bearing the brand name Risperdal. It looked from here like tombstones.

  ‘What I need to know is what can happen while I’m out cold. I mean, how dangerous is it? How dangerous am I?’ I don’t know why I had decided to make an appointment to see my doctor. I had been through all this, years before, when I had first been diagnosed. But then Saskia flitted into my thoughts. I was doing this because of Saskia. Her death had spooked me. Death was inches away for all of us. It was in the shape of the cars that tore along the streets, only a kerb and a bit of concentration keeping a ton of very hard from a couple of hundred pounds of very soft. It was in a poorly cooked chop, or a loose bit of scaffolding. It crawled on the fingers of a friend reaching out to shake your hand.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I could refer you to a specialist, but they probably know as much as I do, only with different letters after their name.’

  We sat staring at each other for a while. He took off his glasses, a pair of old-fashioned horn-rimmed jobs, and chewed meditatively on one of the ear-rests. ‘What is happening to you,’ he said, ‘is nothing to do with epilepsy, or anything like that, you know that, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re suddenly finding yourself in a position that most of us find ourselves in after a few hours in bed. You’re REMming, but you’re awake, or rather, you’re in a waking state.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to harm yourself, unless, you know, you fall into a tank of piranhas or something.’

  I nodded again. Laughed. The smoke and the laughter. All we needed was a pint and the sound of a darts match in the background.

  ‘What about other people?’

  ‘I can’t vouch for other people. You’re the only narcoleptic I – ’

  ‘I mean, what about me harming other people?’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Dr Ferguson replaced his spectacles and went back to doodling on his pad. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Braces. His jacket was draped over the back of his chair. There was something in his hair – Dax, Brylcreem – that made it glisten beneath the fluorescent strip light, made it seem more blue than black. There was a wave in it that made him look a bit more dashing than he ought to. He looked a bit Ted Hughes, a bit David Owen.

  ‘I don’t think you need to worry too much about that,’ he said. ‘You’re not a violent person, are you?’ He raised his eyebrows. I shook my head. ‘So there’s no reason to expect you to start behaving like Biffa Bacon when the lights go out. You should tell people about it. So they know what to expect. A full-on cataplectic attack can be a pretty shocking thing to watch. Especially for children. Got kids?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘None that I know of.’

  He smiled, capped his pen, pushed away his pad of doodles.

  ‘What are you taking for it at the moment?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. He frowned. I told him about the ineffectiveness of the Ritalin.

  ‘Popular with the Yanks,’ he said, dismissively. ‘I could put you on Anafranil or Concordin. Tricyclic antidepressants. They could help.’

  ‘Any side effects?’

  ‘Of course there are,’ he said, and then, as if he was reading it from a label: ‘Can cause interference with the male sexual function.’

  I said I would think about it, and see how the attacks continued. I didn’t like the thought of taking antidepressants. And the possibility of interference with the male sexual function sounded like something to avoid for as long as possible.

  I was getting ready to go, feeling frustrated, unfulfilled, as if I had expected the doctor to unfold me and pick out all the bits of strange fluff in my creases, when he tapped his pad with his pen.

  ‘Any strange dreams?’ he asked. ‘Any nightmares?’

  I thought about the vivid episode I had had involving Saskia. Her arms unravelling in the bath. I thought of the baby turning in her stomach.

  ‘A few,’ I said.

  ‘Try not to worry about it,’ he said. ‘Hypnagogic hallucinations. They can seem absurdly real, and affect all your senses. They’re basically dreams that project into your wakefulness. Non-narcs can experience them too, but you should be aware, you should know that it’s quite all right. Quite safe.’

  I left then, with him advising me to try to follow a regular sleeping routine at night, and taking naps throughout the day, if I felt I needed them.

  Outside, everything suddenly seemed unreal, as if it was a scene being played out by a brain that didn’t see things the same way as everyone else. The traffic followed the rules: there was no running of red lights, no illegal overtaking, no horns being sounded. A man dressed head to toe in blue stood in a department store doorway, as still as the mannequins flanking him in the windows. He held a phone to his ear but he did not speak once. Four police cars followed each other serenely towards Paddington, like an escaped theme park ride.

  I walked around for a while, had coffee in St Christopher’s Place, had a look in a few bookshops, drifting, waiting for something to happen. In truth, I was waiting for an attack. I didn’t imagine it would be any different from usual, but Fergie’s words about hypnagogic hallucination were still fresh, and I wondered if I might identify something that would let me know if what I was seeing was real or otherwise.

  I called Yoyo.

  ‘Do you want to play out?’ I asked her.

  ‘Hi, this is Yoyo. It’s cold out, I’ve got a mug of hot chocolate here, a new book, and some soundtrack music on the stereo. Insert your own answer when you hear the beep.’

  I managed to persuade her to meet me at Russell Square Tube, so that she wouldn’t have to change trains anywhere. We had a look in Skoob, but she didn’t buy anything. ‘Not when I’ve got a book on the go. I don’t buy a new book till I’ve finished the one I’m on. Bad luck.’

  I found a nice copy of The End of the Affair, and bought it for Nuala.

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘Food,’ I said. ‘Let me buy you something to eat.’

  The Brunswick Centre was everything that Yoyo wasn’t: low-rise and high-density. We walked along the public space between the residential blocks, away from the Renoir cinema and the bookshop. There was a cheap café and we sat at a table outside because there was a big party of yabbering locals inside, drinking espresso, eating pastries and smoking like they were in competition.

  Yoyo ordered a fried egg sandwich and I went for a toasted cheese and tomato. Big coffees. Someone in the tightly-packed grid of flats was playing old music. You could tell it was old, because it didn’t last long, and it had a fiendishly infectious tune. We listened to it for a while, and Yoyo started swaying on her chair and clicking her fingers:

  Yesterday it rained in Tennessee,

  I heard it also rained in Tallahassee,

  But not a drop fell on little old me,

  Cos I was in shu-shu-shu, shu-shu-shu, shu-shu-shu-shu-shu-shu Sugar Town.

  Three broken umbrellas jutted out of a litter bin, a sight that saddened me. Broken umbrellas are terribly depressing. Hobbling pigeons hung around, eyeing us nervously, their feet tangled up with twine, or clumped with chewing gum, or severed. The music had been switched off, replaced by the sound of
the café’s extractor fan and the muted sound of a football match on the TV.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘What are you reading?’

  She slid the top half of her book out of its pocket.

  ‘Sipping Midnight. Never heard of it. Any good?’ She nodded, and then our coffees turned up, and she spent a while blowing on hers, her big, liver-coloured lips sending kisses across the frothy surface.

  I had never seen Yoyo read a word of these novels she carried around with her. I wondered sometimes if they were comforters, her version of a teddy bear, or a favourite blanket, something to hold near to her while all the weirdness and terror howled around outside. Some of them were fairly thick volumes. I doubted she could get through them unless she was spending all of her time reading, or at least skimming.

  ‘How are you bearing up?’ I asked. We didn’t need to mention Saskia directly. I wanted to ask her about that day we searched for the blue car, but at the last moment I realised that it hadn’t actually happened. That day had existed inside me. In a way, I was glad about that. Glad that Yoyo hadn’t really seen what had turned itself inside out in the bath.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘A little jaded. I feel as though I’ve got a hangover all the time, regardless of whether I’ve been drinking.’ She looked tired. Her hair smelled of fresh shampoo, but it appeared lank and uncared for. The whorls in her skin, where the sunlight glanced off her, looked out of whack, as if this was her mirror image, and not the original Yoyo sitting with me. She kept rubbing her hands together, maybe trying to get rid of some dry skin, or sticky residue. It seemed as if she were vacillating over a prayer.

  ‘I can’t think about the future too much,’ she said. ‘I’m scared of it. Scared of something that doesn’t exist yet. But it’s there, all ready to unfold, the days, weeks and years, all empty and superficial. Filled with nothing but books about other people, nowhere near here. I don’t feel involved, at any level. I don’t feel as if I’m a cog in the machine. I don’t mesh with anything. Anyone.’

  ‘You mesh with me,’ I said. ‘I might only be a small machine, but you’re a big cog in it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, in the way people say thanks when they get a compliment they don’t really believe. She bit into her sandwich and chewed slowly, ruminatively, as if she had a mouth full of gravel rather than soft egg and bread.

  ‘I feel like an echo of everything close to me,’ she said.

  ‘You need a man,’ I said. ‘Or a job.’

  ‘I haven't worked for ages,’ she said. ‘Give me a job now and I wouldn't know what to fucking do with it.’ She thought about another bite, but replaced her sandwich on the plate. She turned her attention to her coffee, and her book. Her fingers stroked the top edge of tightly packed pages.

  ‘As for men, who wants to go out with Bride of Frankenstein?’

  ‘Tall women are in this season,’ I said.

  ‘Alas, ladders aren’t.’

  We laughed, and drank our coffee.

  She said, ‘Shall I take you to see something?’

  A splintering edge of afternoon sunlight broke free of the concrete division of ledges behind us. Her face darkened and I has to shield my eyes to find its details again. A bright smile was hanging there. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We caught a Connex South Eastern train at Charing Cross Road. The Thames, as we crossed it, was listless and soiled, like slow blood in an over-tapped vein. The heat of the carriage and its motion sent me to sleep. When I wakened, seemingly seconds later – it was about ten minutes – we were somewhere I didn’t recognise. A shopping precinct went by on the right. A snooker hall. A Bingo parlour. It was as if we had escaped the city to a provincial town.

  Yoyo was holding my hand. ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

  ‘Lewisham,’ she said.

  We caught a bus to Hither Green and, crossing the road, turned off on to a quiet street. The corner building seemed to be some kind of crèche; through the window I could see kids playing in a sea of coloured plastic balls. Opposite was St George’s hospital, a condemned building, so quiet that it seemed to be sucking any noise from behind us into its walls.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. Yoyo nodded ahead of us, and we passed through some open gates into a park.

  ‘Mountsfield Park,’ she said. ‘Where I was first kissed.’

  It was a fairly run of the mill park, a bit of green to rescue you from the headache of the A205, and the ugly blot below it that was Catford.

  ‘How long ago are we talking?’ I asked. ‘How many years? Or was it some time last week?’

  She kicked me, and tugged my sleeve as she peeled off to the right towards some shabby tennis courts. ‘Down here,’ she said. ‘Me and Alex Subton. October the fifth, Nineteen eighty five. We were both thirteen. He was wearing these black trainers, new on that day. Cruisers, they were called. And he had these stretch jeans, skin tight. And an Adidas T-shirt, one of those Ivan Lendl jobs. He had this gorgeous dark skin, he looked like he always had a tan. Soft, curly hair, kind of blond, kind of brown.’

  The trees moved; I caught a glimpse of the swollen urban snarl-up spilling away towards Bromley and Beckenham. I followed Yoyo into a dappled gap in the bushes. On the floor was a torn, pulpy mass of glossy pages from a pornographic magazine. Next to it, as if she had just discarded it, or been copying its poses, a woman was sitting back against a tree, her face scratched and scarred so deeply that no features remained. Her skirt had ridden up, revealing a naked crotch obscured by blue paint. One of her breasts had been cut away: the hole in its place had been stuffed with more pages.

  I felt my legs turn to pulp. ‘Jesus,’ I heard myself hiss.

  ‘He had this squint, you know, like a turn in his eye, only very slight, but he was so self-conscious. He’d look at you with one eye closed, as if he was staring at the sun.’

  Even when I could see that it was a mannequin, some plastic, red-mouthed, hard-nippled come-on rescued from a shop window, my heart wouldn’t slow down; the force of my relief seemed even more shocking. Yoyo had stopped and was leaning back against a tree, her eyes closed, lost to a moment nearly twenty years old.

  ‘He kissed me here. He pressed me back against the tree, he said my name. His tongue tasted sweet, like chocolate. Like milk. I could feel his dick poking my thigh. Our teeth were clashing, and there was a cut-off branch or something sticking in my back, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was delicious. I got home, and I was, Jesus, I was sopping.’

  Her eyes opened. She seemed glassy, not there. It looked as if the muscles that governed her face had all done something other than what they had been used to all her life. She was different, for a moment. Someone else. ‘Oh God, Adam. I’m sorry. My stupid mouth. It’s just. I’ve been...’ And now she started to cry. ‘I’m so lonely.’

  So instead of moving out of the bushes, and dragging her off for a beer, getting her to snap out of it, I moved to her and put my arms around her and hugged her. And that too became something else, and as she freed her breasts and they puckered in the chill, her face was hot against mine, her mouth kissing my ear, tonguing me. Her breath was urgent, almost distressed. She said: ‘I’ve been reading maps. At night, before I go to sleep, I look at maps. You look at them for long enough, you see patterns there.’

  I felt myself thickening in her hand. She raised her skirt; she was wearing pale stockings with rubber tops that dug into her thighs. Frantically, she thumbed at her gusset, pulling it to one side. She was so hot. She was so slippery that I thought I would slide straight through her. The clumsiness of our movements went away, and fluidity replaced it as we found a rhythm. One of her long legs was wrapped around me, her right heel was slapping against my right arm. My face was against her breasts, being painted with the cold spit that I had slicked across them. Her hat had slipped forward and was concealing an eye. The other was shut, moving like someone in REM sleep. I thought of what Dr Ferguson had said and suddenly everything began to tilt. Her mouth was open: a pink tunn
el that I instinctively crammed with my fingers. She sucked at them, but I was losing my nerve, certain that something had been trying to come out of that tunnel before I blocked its path. I turned away and gazed at the sightless creature collapsed in the bushes. Again, a tilting, but the usual one: a moment of absence, when my body and mind felt detached by a sliver of alien heat. My thoughts folded inwards, to the sleeping curve of flesh in Saskia’s tummy. As it had done last time, it turned its head towards me and opened its eyes: brilliant pinpricks, the headlights of trains, emerged from them. Its yawning mouth loosed the thunder of arrival: hundreds of tons of metal squealing to a stop.

  ‘It’s like The White Album,’ she muttered into my shoulder as I softened within and against her. ‘Like The White Album after the Manson murders. You know? Messages everywhere. Signs. You look at the maps and you swear there’s something buried there for you. If only you knew how to look. Something coming through, like a shape you recognise in the clouds. Like faces in the fire.’