When it was over, she stood up. ‘Come,’ she said, without a hint of irony. My mouth was filled with the taste of fruit on the turn. Cloying. Musty. I dumbly followed her, but the farther we went, the more she seemed to sag, though the terrain was even and pleasant on the feet. When the trees began to encroach on us, I glanced back, at the route we’d taken, at our footsteps creating tracks in the green. Already we had walked further than we ought to have been able. By now, we should have been standing in some room in the University of Westminster on the Euston Road.
The elms in front of us were stunted, their boughs filled with famished branches. Any foliage was brownish, pitted with scars; in stark contrast to the vital sproutings we’d encountered at the other end of the park. In between the trunks, crazily, impossibly, I could see parts of London that should have been miles away, but here they were, up close: mist drizzling into the bowl of the City; the winking tip of Canary Wharf; a scattering of bright canvas parasols in St Christopher’s Square; subdued light skipping off the roofs of cars on the South Circular. I noticed a tear in Meddie’s combats; a bruise gave her leg an alien tinge.
‘Things are happening,’ she said. ‘There are leaks. There are infections. These places we’ve found, they seemed to promise so much, but they’re all fouled and fucked. Everything’s fucked.’
I felt the air go out of me in a sudden rush as she prodded around at the foot of the trees and came up holding the fly-blown corpse of a baby. There were others like it piled like firewood in amongst the boughs like a gruesome game of hide and seek. Some of them had elongated faces, warped and alien as though pulled out of true before their skulls had time to harden.
Something gurgled.
‘Meddie,’ I said, and my voice surprised me: it had taken on a flighty, fascinated whine despite what I was seeing.
It was dying. Its torso was clearly defined, yet somewhere south of its hips the flesh became milky and ill-formed, like chicken flesh seen through layers of polythene wrapping. It died quickly, before we could get to it (although I didn’t know what I might have done to keep it alive had we reached it in time); its body flexing like a large muscle before slackening completely. Despite my revulsion, and feeling faintly dislocated, as though my hand belonged to someone else, I reached out and touched the area where flesh and form became mismatched. The cool, slightly fluid sensation continued beyond the body; I chased it with my fingers, reaching up as far as I could. When I pulled them back, they felt tight and shiny, the way skin feels after molten wax has been allowed to dry upon it. When I rubbed my palm, a layer came away, only to drift away to nothing in the air.
Meddie seemed to be unaware of this black magic; she was more concerned with the trees; the fan of grass at her foot which was unhealthily tinged.
‘London’s going off,’ she said. I might have laughed at that if she had said it at any other time, anywhere else. She swivelled her huge eyes and trapped me with them: a startled rabbit.
‘And what about you?’ I said. ‘You and Iain? And Yoyo?’ My heart suddenly lurched. I had not heard from Yoyo for a long time. It seemed inconceivable that something should happen to her, but how could it not, if she were in cahoots with the others?
‘What about us?’
‘The bruises. I’m not stupid. What’s going on?’
‘We’re infected too,’ she said.
‘How?’ I said. And then: ‘What with?’ I wiped my lips with the back of my hand.
‘I don’t know. But it started when we unearthed all these little pockets of London. And it’s getting easier, Adam. I’m drawn to them now, where before I had to work at it. I was following hunches before. Now I’m like an elephant smelling water a hundred miles away. I know where to go.’
‘But look at what it’s doing to you,’ I said.
No matter that her body was failing, or that it was doing things that a body in her state clearly shouldn’t be capable of doing, I was jealous that I had not been able to unlock London in the same way. It might have been madness, a collective hysteria that was the only infection going on, but it had me like fever. I could see what they were seeing, but I couldn’t divine my own little pocket. I wouldn’t have known where to start. London was still being niggardly with its gifts to me. London was the lock on a safe that I had the combination to, but all of the numbers on the dial had been rubbed off.
She said, ‘I feel as thought I’m slipping away, bit by bit. Fading. Falling through a gap in the world.’
I closed my eyes and wished it all away. When I opened them, the sky had darkened a shade and the world had turned another couple of degrees. The trees were still there, the appalling carpet of grass and bodies too. But for the third time that afternoon, Meddie had vanished. I didn’t try looking for her. I felt weak and sickly, as if some of what was cooking her had been transferred to me. I went home. On the way I called Yoyo. Her answering machine kicked in and I listened to her voice – pleasant, almost teasing – and I listened to the silence after the beep, not filling it, just thinking of what the reasons might be as to why she couldn’t come to the phone and talk to me.
Chapter 10
Bruises
It’s tied her tightly to the chair. Gagged her with the knickers she was wearing. It’s shaved her head. She cried when It did that. Such vanity, it really amuses It. Even though she’s never going to be seen by anyone ever again, she worries about her appearance. It holds up a mirror so that she can see what she looks like.
This is a beautiful flat. High ceilings, deep carpet. There’s a wall filled with books and a small cabinet in which some smoky metallic box winks green light. A stereo, apparently, but the working of it is beyond It. There’s a large desk in the adjoining room, upon which sits a ruby iMac and a framed photograph. In the bathroom a cluster of expensive-looking jars and tubes and bottles are piled beneath an ornate mirror. Outside, there’s a garden with a pond. A fountain plays its water music. Large silver fish move lazily through its fun.
It picks up the copy of yesterday’s Standard from the sofa, points at the headline: THIRD TUBE DEATH IN A WEEK PANICS COMMUTERS then points at It. Her eyes widen and she starts making short yelping noises around the gag. A frothy dribble escapes the corner of her mouth. Her breasts quiver like poached eggs on a plate.
Bored, It sits down and spreads Its hands. ‘Sorry,’ It whispers. It means it. She doesn’t look convinced. ‘No, really. I am sorry. But it’s all for a purpose. You dying – ’ she renews her yelping but then stops when she sees Its expression darken. ‘You dying will be for a good cause. Your death, all these deaths will prove a catalyst.’
What? Her eyes beg.
‘A slap around the head,’ It explains. ‘A wake-up call.’ It leans over and presses the grime of Its fingertips against her so pale, so cleansed, toned and moisturised face. Her un-face. ‘It’s just all this shit… you know? How we live so close to each other and we never talk. I bet you’ve got people living in this house, in the other flats, that you’ve never spoken to. There are people we stand next to every morning on a platform or in a queue. We’ve stood next to them for years. They aren’t strangers but we never talk to them. Ask them how they are. The only talking we ever want to do is on the telephone. Phones should be banned in the city. If you want to talk to someone, go and see them. It’ll get so we lose the use of our facial expressions. It’ll get so one ear is permanently flattened against the head, one fingertip flattened from all that dialling. How would you like to die?’
It leaves her for a while, goes into the kitchen. It doesn’t mean to kill her. But It needs her to be scared, scared enough to go through with what It needs from her. It’s choosing a knife from a block when It sees the pictures on the wall, pinned together as a rough collage on cork backing. Pictures of her with friends. A lot of boys. Popular. It carries the knife into the living room where It finds that she’s turning blue, a gruel of vomit oozing from her nostrils.
‘Oh. Not like that, doctor,’ It sighs, pulling away the gag so t
hat she can be sick in comfort. If she goes like this, It’ll… ‘I’ll not be happy.’ Something other than the sight of her bound arms jerking as her body lazily spasms, her eyes bugging out of her stupid little head, irritates It. She’s making a lot of noise. It claps her on the back with such force that It knocks the chair to the floor. It seems to do the trick. She’s lying there, a professional woman, all her dignity gone. It can see brown smears on the crack of her arse. It hauls her upright and wipes the sick from her face. She’s got slightly crooked teeth and a faint moustache of fair hair. She’s got a mole right on the dimple of her chin.
She says, ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.’
It says: ‘Maybe we can come to some sort of arrangement. But only if you’ll agree to do something awful for me…’
With Meddie withdrawing into herself and needing strangers for the specific comfort she sought, and Yoyo incommunicado, I found I was forced to get in touch with Iain.
‘It’s been a while,’ I said, when he met me at The Beehive one late afternoon in November. The sky was molten anthracite. We were sitting at a table by the window; over Iain’s shoulder I could see Baker Street, teeming with cars, and a queue at the Barclay’s bank cash machine on the corner that stretched almost up to the doors of the charity shop opposite the pub. There was a queue too at the Baker Street cinema, although I couldn’t make out what was being shown: two buses were parked at the side of the road, hazards flashing: the reason for such a build up of traffic.
‘Has it?’ he asked. He was wearing a black corduroy jacket a couple of sizes too big for him, and faded black Levi’s. An old, off-white T-shirt and a silver chain hanging over it. He had a large sports holdall with him, which contained a serge uniform. He hated wearing it before he got to work; the material could hardly breathe and before he started his shift he’d be pickled, his shirt in a mess. ‘I’ve got three shirts. All of them are rotting to fuck.’ His face seemed thinner than normal, and there were grey flashes in his dark brown hair. His eyes were the same, brutal blue flares.
‘Doesn’t feel as if you’ve been away,’ Iain said. ‘You’ve been up our arses ever since you gave us that sob story about the zeds. You wanted out, but you really wanted in, without the effort. Without having to talk to me.’
There was no use protesting. He was saying it matter-of-factly, not offering his words as questions for me to bat away. He lit a cigarette and I noticed a pale bruise on his left hand, in the V between his thumb and forefinger. I got us a couple more pints and found my hands shaking as I received my change. Iain gulped back half his pint before I’d sat down. It seemed to have got darker inside the pub. The lights behind the bar, and those on the fruit machine, blazed more intently. The sky had lowered, somehow: its strange, heavy colour was bleeding on to the streets, glossing them, giving everything a clean edge, a new shadow. There was rain in that sky, you could feel the weight of it, bearing down.
‘What have you been up to?’ I asked.
‘This and that. Showing a few films at lock-up parties out Finsbury Park way. Some old stag stuff. Weird stuff. Underground stuff, mainly from the 1960s. New York. You know, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, The Kuchar Brothers. Blonde Cobra, Overstimulated, Sins of the Fleshapoids, Flaming Creatures... you know that one?’
I shook my head, not really listening to him. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
‘How about this new hobby of yours?’ I asked.
He snorted laughter. Smoke flew from his nostrils. ‘Hobby,’ he said, slowly, as if trying the word out for the first time. He didn’t say anything else for a while, just worked slowly at his Stella Artois. I didn’t know what else to say, and knew that if I opened my mouth to offer anything, it would sound desperate, the sound of a man trying to fill an awkward silence. All I wanted to ask him about was the places he’d found. I was curious, I wanted closure with the group, but the only way I was going to have it was being let in on their secrets. I needed to know that what they had found was less a secret pocket in the middle of London, and more a sense of who they really were. Truth be known, I wanted in on it. I wanted in because I didn’t know who I was and I needed all the help I could get.
Iain seemed to sense this. I could see it in the insouciant way he tapped the ash from his cigarette, and the half-smile that curled one side of his mouth.
He said, ‘They do good burgers here.’
‘Want one?’ I said, glad for something to say. He raised his eyebrows briefly.
‘With cheese,’ he said, as I set off for the bar again. While I was waiting to be served, he said, ‘What must it be like, wanting for a burger and having to eat salad instead?’
I turned and looked at him quizzically.
‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Losing some fat. Living carefully. Everything in moderation. Nibbling cress when you could be gorging yourself at the fucking table we found.’
‘I want it,’ I said, hating myself. Fucking hating myself.
‘It’ll cost you,’ he said. ‘And more than a measly cheeseburger.’ He swept up his cigarettes and his lighter and he was outside before I had chance to tell the barmaid that I had changed my mind, I didn’t want to order any food after all.
Iain had dumped his garage job in Oxford in favour of security work for a firm called Barrier, a pissy little outfit with an office in a business park behind Kentish Town Road. They took the work that other firms didn’t bother tendering for because of the high risks and low pay involved. ‘They’re prawns sitting around the outflow pipe with their gobs open,’ Iain said. He earned £3.50 an hour patrolling building sites in the less salubrious areas of the city. When I asked him why, he said he’d had it with routine and was attracted to the unsociable hours and the silence offered by security work. He was sick to the back teeth of Swarfega and Citroëns. One night around five a.m., when it was just him and Sir, the Alsatian, doing the rounds in the car park of a new petrol station being built on the Seven Sisters Road, he’d stumbled upon couples fucking in the open air, in a small park adjacent to Manchester Road.
‘It was real meat and potatoes stuff,’ he told me, his face slashed to ribbons of grey and orange by the streetlamps along Camden Road. There was me and him on the top deck of the 253, and a couple of students who’d got on at the stop outside Sainsbury’s and were tearing into their economy packs of Malted Milk. ‘These girls, thin and white, prozzers they must have been, three of them, bent over and getting their insides pulped to fuck by guys, I don’t know, on their way home from the pub, nipping out to take the dog for a walk. And they were quiet as graves, even though they were banging away like their lives depended on it.’
I didn’t know why he was telling me this. How could it have anything to do with the project they had been involved with over the past couple of months? Had they all seen this, or were they falling into their own, individual territories? And what was it with the bruises? I gritted my teeth, knowing that to start asking him questions was to put a lid on him for a while. He didn’t like being interrogated. He gave his information when he was ready to give it; it didn’t matter if you thought it relevant or not.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, despite myself. He replied by turning to watch the scenery pass us by. Holloway prison, the traffic at the Holloway Road junction, Finsbury Park. When we were motoring up past Manor House Tube, he looked back at me, and his face was like that of a child’s moments away from its birthday surprise.
‘Next stop,’ he said.
We disembarked on Amhurst Park. A couple of the streetlamps were out; the one directly above our heads flickered, dissolving Iain and then stamping him back into true. I grabbed his arm, nailing his reality, and hissed: ‘Where the fuck are we going?’
He led me into Bethune Road past ranks of rusted, broken down and abandoned cars; a fridge with its mouth open wide, gasping for breath around the pounds of litter that were choking it; a mattress half folded out of the gateway of an uninhabited house, the brickwork of which was failing: l
arge wooden beams held its face erect. A pregnant dog regarded us dolefully from the mattress as we passed. Her mouth was open to show us her teeth. It was only when we got downwind of her that I smelled the death pouring off her and realised the swelling in her belly was rats.
We kept walking. At the bottom of the road, a park bench supported two towers of matted clothing filled with things that might once have been people. They were tossing each other off and drinking from bottles of Thunderbird. Before we reached that far, Iain took a sharp left, into the gap between two dark houses. A tiny gulley flanked with yew hedges gave on to a small crescent in which a café was nestled. Polished, wedge-shaped cars hunkered against pavements that seemed dust-free and uncannily level. The car interiors gleamed dully; I could almost smell the soft breath of leather. Rain-bright slates trapped the sun and cast fractal greens and blues into my eyes. The trill of pastel-coloured birds was everywhere. The lack of bustle panicked me for a moment. I didn’t feel right. This didn’t feel right. But I couldn’t find a way of voicing my discomfort. The coffee shop sucked us in. We took seats by the window. The warm vinyl impurities of a Sam Cooke song accompanied the pleasant sounds of an espresso machine chuckling in the background.
The free-floating anxieties that had settled on me over the past few years seemed to slip a little, as if I’d suddenly found the knots that bound them to me and discovered a way to loosen them.
‘Iain, bonjour. You’ve caught a little of the summer,’ said the waitress, slipping into the seat opposite him and gesturing vaguely across her face. ‘Freckles. No, don’t pout. On you they are quite appealing.’
London Revenant Page 11
