I pressed my hand over her mouth and she relaxed against the cold bark of the tree. The lack of movement anywhere was as comforting as a thick blanket from childhood. I rested my head against her tits and listened for her heartbeat.
‘Tall girls,’ I said. ‘You can’t beat them.’
Chapter 9
Vade mecum
God, how it hurts It to do this. Topside, the watery sun is still too bright for Its eyes. It spends half an hour cowering in the shade of a leafless tree, hoping for some acclimatisation, not knowing how It’s going to do what It needs to do. Still, there might be a chance – the traffic is very slow. And she is a doctor.
Just as It’s decided she isn’t going to show – that she must have gone home by a different route, or forsaken home for another appointment – she appears, hunched over the wheel of her car. She’s belting out a song and suddenly it feels as though It wants to stop her more to find out what it is than to make any contact. It waits till she’s bound to see It, then It walks straight out in front of her. Collapse.
She slams on the brakes, even though she’s only doing fifteen tops. A couple of oncoming dolts have stopped by the pavement to rubberneck. There’s already a tailback. Her door opens. Hmm, The Jam. Going Underground. The urge to laugh is almost too great.
She feels for Its pulse and loosens Its clothing. She’s making soothing noises. She leans over It to check in Its mouth and It pulls her close enough to push Its tongue in before It bites her bottom lip. She makes a noise and tries to pull back but It’s got her. Nobody can see what’s going on. It pulls a metal spike from Its jacket and presses it against her windpipe. Opens Its eyes. It sends a message to her. It’s very clear. One false move…
It hides the spike and she slowly stands up. It stands up with her, thanking her profusely, explaining that It just felt faint and that Its sorry It caused such a fuss. The crowd is already dispersing, disappointed at the lack of drama. It asks her if she wouldn’t mind taking It home. She shakes her head, dazed. Thanks awfully, you’re really very kind and… do as I say. If I for one moment believe that you are trying something funny I will rip your throat out and you’ll have time to watch me feed it to you before you die.
It’s comfortable in her car. Cocooned, It relaxes and watches the streets blur. She’s making a whimpering noise – not unpleasant. It copies it, pitch perfect. The traffic thins and she winds up the power in this little bucket. She selects third gear, veers on to the slip road just before the Westway takes off into the dusk, and It sinks in Its seat, imagining Itself as a fighter pilot skimming the horizon. The sun is bloodying the horizon. It says Chances are, you will not survive until morning.
After Saskia’s death, the party people needed a new distraction. Thanks to Yoyo’s new obsession, they found it in London, or rather, they went about trying to find it in London. Whether it was a reaction to how Saskia had died, or something refreshed in them that needed to turn away from hedonism for a while, they took it upon themselves to discover oases within the rotten heart of the city. They’d heard — rumours in crowded bars, rammed Tube trains, endless bus queues — they’d heard of places so clean and new that it was like being in a dream. Places that were like the ideal parts of your own interior, places you would never find in a lifetime of needing them. And they didn’t mean Kensington, or Hampstead. Lost places. Pockets of wow.
I didn’t fancy it. I didn’t fancy it and I didn’t believe in it. I didn’t want to spend my spare time sipping halves of bitter in off-the-beaten-track pubs and saying, This is nice, isn’t it? I decided it was time I had my break from the group, so I met them for lunch at a neutral venue and told them about my narcolepsy and that a doctor had advised I spend as much time at home resting. As much as I’d like to hang around with you guys, I said.
There was much in the way of sympathy, as well as an open invitation to return to the fold once I was feeling better.
‘If you want to,’ Iain said, scrutinising me, as if trying to see the narcolepsy in the shape of my nose, or the colour of my skin. ‘Sleep on it,’ he said.
He was the real reason for my retreat, not Yoyo, who I would miss, or Meddie, who I was still going to be seeing anyway, at work. There was something about Iain that worried me. Something beneath the layers of bravado and abandon that smelled of violence, or madness, or both. I didn’t want to be around when it surfaced.
The party people became pocket people, hunting the streets of London for their micro-Utopias. Over time I heard from Meddie about cemeteries and quiet parks they’d found, in the most unusual places, and I thought, yeah, right, so far, so Time Out, but over the coming weeks, things seemed to get more intense. Yoyo would tell me, when I managed to catch her on the phone at home, that they were spending more and more time on the hoof, clutching large, spiral-bound A-Z street atlases that were becoming less relevant by the day.
‘You wouldn’t believe the places we’re finding, Ads,’ Yoyo said, in a small, uncertain voice that suggested that she didn’t quite believe it either.
Meddie became less forthcoming about the areas they were searching, or what they did there when they found what they were looking for. I suspected that despite happening upon their little pockets of calm, their group dynamic was anything but. They were pranging themselves against each others’ hard edges: away from the loud music, the rooms full of coats and plastic cups of cheap Bulgarian red, there was really little they had in common, and it was hurting them to find out. Meddie grew more solemn at work, and I noticed small bruises appearing on the backs of her arms, her calves. She took to wearing long sleeve pullovers, and jeans. Her hair, which she never wore down, she wore down. It gave her a guarded look. She appeared hunted.
We had never spoken about Saskia since her death, and I was worried that now it might be too late to say anything. Meddie had changed. She had become more aggressively, more recklessly carnal, as if she wanted to atone for Saskia’s treatment of her unborn baby by having one of her own. She would flirt with the men that came into The Pit Stop, as she always had, but none of the humour was there any more. Instead, she was coarse and direct. The four nights I worked there one week, a month after Saskia’s death, she went home with five men.
By chance I bumped into her one afternoon in Tottenham Court Road, when I had decided to do something about my flat, and spend what pittance I had on some kind of wardrobe. I was sneering at the expensive cherry wood chest of drawers in Heal’s when I felt a hand press against my shoulder blade.
‘Bit upmarket for you, isn’t it?’ she asked, but it was as if someone else was speaking through her. Her voice was stripped down, raw, mechanical.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked. I was expecting someone, a man, to materialise alongside her; she was so rarely by herself, but today, it seemed, she was.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. She was holding a shopping basket that contained candles, soap, tea towels, a brown suede cushion cover. Her hair was down again and I had to resist the urge to lift it, irrationally certain, if I did, that I would find a necklace of rot eating into her flesh. She wore faded jeans that could do with a wash, a tight white T-shirt, a red leather biker jacket that highlighted the red in her eyes. Her lips, which were a natural cerise – she never used lipstick – were pale, but their edges were sore, as if she had been rubbing them with a handkerchief. I felt suddenly desperate to keep her with me, at least for a little while longer. Already she was turning to go, and, unconsciously, I was mirroring her.
‘Coffee,’ I said.
She shared my dislike of department store cafeterias, and we crossed the road to avoid the chains too. She had left her shopping basket by the bathroom accessories. ‘I didn’t want to buy anything,’ she said. ‘I just like browsing, sometimes, and filling a basket with stuff that I’d like. But I hate queues so much that I never go through with it.’
There was a small sandwich shop tucked out of the way at the north end of Whitfield Street and I bought lattés and a plate of tuna mayo sandwiches. We
squeezed past a couple of builders too busy with their sausages and chips to help us get by, and found an empty table in the corner. I turned my back for a second in order to make the space I needed to shrug off my jacket, and when I faced front again, she had gone.
There was no reaction from anyone else in the cramped seating section, and for a moment I questioned my own sanity, thought that I hadn’t actually seen Meddie at all, that I had imagined it all, but there were a couple of coffees here, and enough food for two people. I left my jacket where it was and forced my way outside. The cold coated me on the threshold. Nothing but pale roads stretching away from me. No sign of her, no sign of anybody.
I went back inside, and there she was, waiting for me, turning up the corner of a slice of granary to see what was underneath. I settled myself opposite her and stared into her eyes, waiting for some kind of explanation. When none was forthcoming, I said: ‘There are no bogs in here, and there isn’t enough room under the table for you to hide, so where were you?’
Despite her evident distaste for the plate of sandwiches, she picked one out and bit off a corner. Through the food she said, ‘Don’t, Adam. Please.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Just leave it, for now. I’ll talk, but not yet.’
We ate the food and drank the coffee in a silence that I had not expected to sit between us. I tried to get her to open up, but this normally garrulous flirt had clammed. She was a different woman. It might have been acceptable to check that her name was in fact Meredith Purches, that she wasn’t an impostor, that the real Meddie wasn’t locked up in a walk-in freezer somewhere, slowly winding down. The woman in front of me looked undernourished, shivery – in any sense of the word – and intractable. She would talk when she was ready. When I had paid, and we were back on the street, she took my hand and led me west, along the streets running parallel to Marylebone Road.
‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ she said.
‘Nobody’s forcing you to.’
‘I’m fucking people in the dark, these days.’
‘What? Meddie, it sounded as though you just – ’
‘I did. Christ, can’t we go somewhere for a drink? A proper drink?’
We walked into the first pub we came to: the Marylebone Tup. I bought pints of lager, thinking, I should be at home with a screwdriver and a set of badly printed instructions. I should, at least, have my underwear stashed away by now. Meddie had secured us a table overlooking Marylebone High Street. Pedestrians walked by carrying Waitrose shopping bags. I noticed Caroline Munro peering into the window of a jeweller’s, but I didn’t think Meddie would be in the mood for celebrity spotting.
‘I’m fucking people in the dark. I’ve never done that before.’
‘How do you mean?’
She nodded, as if she accepted that her statement was ambiguous. It was, as it turned out. She implied that she didn’t remember doing it, as well as the more obvious meaning, and Meddie was no prude.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, although I wanted to ask her about her current bout of promiscuity, whether it was fuelled by anything, whether she was trying to block something out, or discover something about herself. Both options were disturbing.
‘It matters,’ she said.
She had been switching the lights off ever since she had been at a party, the last one Saskia had hosted before her death. Some locals had crashed it and Meddie had been drawn to one of them, a tall, thin guy with braided hair, strong hands and skin the colour and sheen of freshly laid bitumen.
‘We went upstairs. The only free room was a spare bedroom being used for storage. There was no door. It had been taken off so a large sofa could be squeezed through. I didn’t care. You know me. It turned me on, the thought of people going to the toilet and seeing my tail going ten to the dozen. We got down to it, both of us naked, and he’s hunched over me, and it’s like… Adam, his eyes were lit from within.’
I swallowed the mouthful of lager I’d just taken. My mind was on what Meddie looked like naked. Pretty nice, as I remembered. I hadn’t expected her to suddenly stop like that, just when her story was hotting up. Expected less her look of inquiry, as if I might be able to decipher the nonsense she’d just uttered.
‘Maybe it was a reflection,’ I said. ‘Maybe it was light from the streetlamps. Maybe it was true love.’
‘Fuck off, Adam, if you’re not going to help.’
‘We’re having a beer, Meddie. When did meeting you suddenly turn into therapy?’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.
I put my glass down, my gut suddenly jumping, as if I must be the father. I didn’t know what to say. Congratulations were clearly not invited.
‘I can’t be pregnant,’ she said.
‘So have an ab–’
‘No,’ she said, vehemently, and now it was her eyes that seemed to contain their own core of light. ‘I mean I can’t be pregnant. I had an hysterectomy when I was thirteen.’
Maybe it was the afternoon beers, or the smoke in the room, but I was beginning to feel nauseous. Maybe it was Meddie and Iain, studding my brain with little cloves of madness. I tried to claw my way back to a stable position, found my voice hoist up an octave, almost demanding for my explanations to be accepted.
‘No, Adam,’ she said. ‘The operation was a complete success. They scraped me cleaner than a child with a chocolate pot. I had uterine cancer. They had to get it all.’
We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the late afternoon crowd huddled around their tables, laughing, joking, smoking. It all seemed a world away, rather than a few feet. Nobody else was sitting at our table, despite it being able to comfortably accommodate at least six more, despite clumps of drinkers forming in the aisle between the other tables and the bar. The people on the edges of those clumps shuffled away from us. We were enveloped in a chilly pocket, in danger of infecting everyone else in the pub. You could see confusion in the eyes of the staff. You could see them shooting us accusatory glances, without knowing why they were doing it.
Meddie went to get more drinks.
I closed my eyes and I was behind hers, looking up at a dark shape that smelled of cinnamon, whose arms beneath mine felt like smooth, sinuous twists of varnished hardwood. Lifted my gaze and there were pale blue eyes, unblinking, staring down at me, almost too close together to be human. They glowed, like luminous paint on the cusp of fading. He opened his mouth and the smell of wet meadows, of lichen and rotten bark on dead trees fell from it. I came out of that too quickly, like a diver with the bends, his blood fizzing in his veins: I felt the shadows in the room quicken, as if they had sensed their chance was here, that they could consume the shapes that fed them. My own, I was scared to look into my own in case it had eyes that glowed. And then, as I was going down, my foot twisted under the table leg and the weird wrenching pain jerked me awake. People were looking at me, and that was fine, I was used to that. But Meddie was gone again. I stood up fast, sending our empties to the floor, and rushed outside, almost piling into a toddler in a red Mr Bump T-shirt who was wagging his finger at his mum and dad, and yelling excitedly, as if telling them off.
I couldn’t see Meddie on the main drag, and part of me thought good, good, thank Christ for that. I wanted to get back to Heal’s and sneer at more furniture that I couldn’t afford.
‘I have something I want to show you.’
She was standing to my right, a little way down Moxon Street. I followed her.
At the end of the street we entered Paddington Gardens, a small park straddling Paddington Street. I turned back but the toddler and his parents had vanished. Everyone was gone. The park was not as I knew it. The trees seemed to have increased in number and invaded the spaces meant for pedestrians: great boughs thrust up through the paths, splitting the paved areas. The grass here was deep and lush, combed by the wind into perfectly coiffured patches where it was usually strictly maintained. Its patterns up ahead were governed by the path of the breeze, at once dark, the n
ext moment a curve of reflected silver, dancing away like a shoal of fish turning, as one, into a shaft of light. The air felt fresher, slower somehow, almost tangible: I could feel it deep and sticky in my lungs, cleansing me.
‘Where are we going?’ Although I knew as soon as I had asked. Meddie, though holding my hand, seemed to be farther away than the combined lengths of our arms might allow. She suddenly appeared beautiful, as I remembered her from a couple of months previously, before this insanity began. Her skin was unblemished. Her eyes were cat-large and dark, her mouth – even from here I could trace the individual crinkles and creases that patterned the flesh of her lips – bright with the colour of cherries. She opened her mouth to speak and more colours slipped out, but I recognised none of them.
A 747 measured out our madness in miles of white vapour. We sat in the grass.
‘What was it you wanted to show me?’ I reached out and held her wrist. Her flesh seemed boneless, soft as a pillow.
‘Two things,’ she said. ‘First…’ Like the meat of her arm, her lips felt unsupported by anything as solid as tooth or jawbone. Not that the kiss was unpleasant: there was firmness but it was supple, unlike anything I’d ever felt. When her tongue roiled against my own, it too felt unreal and almost unbearably tender.
It’s because she’s rotting, I thought. Squeeze her and she’ll tear open, like a bin bag filled with rot on a hot day. Like a banana blackened by ripeness.
All of my senses seemed strung out, my nerves exposed like guitar strings resonating, waiting for something to show me what was happening. The texture of her mouth was both insubstantial and tactile like the weird repelling force felt through the fingers when you pushed two magnets together. The harder she pushed against me, the more an unbearable vacuum built up between us till I was convinced we would subsume each other. It was a remarkable kiss. She’d never kissed me like that before, even when we were shagging up against the kegs in The Pit Stop cellar.
London Revenant Page 10
