London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  It rose. Everything felt clearer, even as the blood and lymph clogged Its eyes and trickled down Its throat. Its own smell, the freshness of Its life, astonished It. His face sang.

  It looked down at the woman in the chair, her legs still bound together, sweat pooling in the V between her thighs. Shock was painting her own face white. It licked Its lips twice and, carefully, managed a few words. It said: ‘I… owe… you.’

  Iain had called me, sick with a mild bout of gastric flu, and asked if I wanted to make some hard cash by covering for him at the building site. Troake wasn’t bothered who was wearing the uniform, as long as somebody was. It was a little nerve-racking, I mean, I’d never done a night shift before in any capacity, and despite Iain’s sureties that little ever happened, beyond the odd drunken fuck in a sandpit, or kids playing in the empty rooms, I was a little jittery as I climbed on board the bus in his suit, a size too small, the serge itchy and smelling of wet dogs, Wrigley’s Spearmint and Mandate.

  Something seemed to be wrong with these roads the buses were travelling along. They appeared peeling, scrofulous, as though suffering from some sort of skin disease, the roads bulging and tearing, suggesting that the thoroughfares were too wide for the surfaces that glued them together. But that might have been something to do with the fact that I had not eaten since the previous evening. I felt good though, honed, on edge, super-attentive. The blood in my head felt thin and hot, I was pumped up. If any night was right for chasing the insane, it was tonight. I felt mad enough. Iain enough. I was determined to try to find my own secret place, my own pocket.

  And, really, I had no choice in this matter. It was nothing to do with Meddie, or Iain, or Yoyo. It was me. It was the bruises. I was convincing myself that I could see my internal organs through them, as if the skin was becoming so thin as to be translucent. My heart resembled a child’s fist, grey and shocked, being shaken in rage. If I was sustaining bruises, then I must be able to access these blackspots. Fuzzy logic… but it was all I had.

  The 253 was deserted. I sat at the back, remembering my first time on a bus, on my own, my mum seeing me off, my dad in town, waiting for me to arrive. I’d been on my way to get a haircut, and a new PE kit. I remember my mum receding in the window of the bus and a scattershot of panic in my stomach as it hit me that I had never been on my own among strangers before. There was always mum, or dad, or mum and dad. This was how things would be when they were dead, I thought. The panic, and the not knowing, and the strangers. A destination that didn’t exist until it was reached. An in-between that was unbearable, yet inescapable. Grown-ups eyeing me with suspicion or indulgence. Predators. Guardians. Strangers.

  And then Dad at the terminus. And the haircut, a new pair of shorts and a T-shirt. A toasted tea-cake and a milkshake at the Golden Egg and everything forgotten. Everything all right. Me, a big boy now. It was always said: ‘Who’s a big boy? You’re a big boy now.’ As if, in the saying of it, it became so.

  My thoughts fell upon Laura, as they often did when I was focusing on other times, other events, and how nice it would be to be able to enter her flat while she was still asleep, to slip into bed alongside her and enjoy her warmth for an hour or two before she had to get up. Before she realised I was there. I could let myself out again before she was aware of me. She might have my ghost in her thoughts. She might contact me. Try to make things right between us. If not mend things, at least make things right. How I would sit naked on the bed, full of croissants, drained of semen, watching sunlight paint the down on her breasts; edge the moist O of her mouth gold as she snoozed. A soft, amorphous time when there was neither consolidation nor diminishment, before her way towards me had soured, our language turned vituperative, her enthusiasm palled to indifference. It was easy to watch the seams fall apart.

  Lights stuttered; the bus rocked; suddenly there was someone on the top deck, some bleary-eyed dragon sipping from a can of tramp-brew and reading the Bible. I stepped off at Manor House into a draught redolent with the reek of diesel and the previous night’s kebabs. I sensed people checking out my uniform, hostility coming off them like heat. MacCreadle was sitting on the steps of the Portakabin when I arrived, drinking from a West Ham United mug. ‘Keen fucker, hey?’ he said. ‘Not that I’m complaining. Just don’t expect me to turn up half an hour early tomorrow morning. Is that injurious to your good humour? Where’s rat-boy Iain?’

  ‘He’s ill. I don’t mind taking over. It’s just one night.’

  ‘A lot can happen in one night.’

  ‘Hopefully not though, hey?’

  MacCreadle shrugged, emptied his mug on to the floor and eased his boots on over feet so large that to put shoes over them appeared unnatural. He ought to go barefoot. He ought to be wearing nothing more than animal skins and tribal tattoos.

  ‘Last night there was more of the old ultra-violence kicking off outside the pub. Some of it spilled over here. I mashed a few noses, cracked a few skulls, you know how it is. They might have revenge on their minds tonight.’

  ‘I’m no hero,’ I said. ‘I’ll be a mile away before they set foot on this building site.’

  ‘It can be a beautiful building site, this, if you look at it in the right way.’

  I eyed the big man. ‘You been drinking?’

  He smiled. ‘The bricks and the plant and the breezeblocks. The bags of cement. The unlit windows. It fair bristles with potential, this place, don’t you think?’

  ‘You have been drinking. It’s a building site. It’s a shithole.’

  ‘You should spend a bit longer looking at places like this,’ he said. ‘Even the girl with the harelip deserves to be kissed now and then.’ He gathered together his things and somehow folded himself through the doorway. He half-turned and his beard turned the shadow of his face into something that crawled.

  ‘Troake’ll be along around midnight. Best if you stick your tie back on and have your brow furrowed. He likes his staff to look on the ball.’

  The engine of his Harley starting ripped the night in two. People came to their windows to watch him leave, as if relieved, as if they needed a security guard to keep them safe from the security guard. ‘See you later, masturbator,’ he called out, as he accelerated away.

  I drank some strong coffee and tried to work out where the time hadn’t gone to. Four hours till midnight, and Troake. Another half hour after that before I was able to slope off and start divining.

  Across the way, the pub was filling up. I could make out shapes in the window, throwing darts. Other faces were underlit with brilliant, ever-changing light: a fruit machine, or pinball. Light caught on a million glittering fragments of glass in the car park, like a beach of diamonds. The rest of the estate behind it was all chewing gum whites and graffiti, painted wickets and goalposts on splintered garage doors; the people I could see walking between the stairwells looked like shabby pigeons cadging titbits, grey and misshapen with crusty, dazed stares and scarred faces. How had Iain described them? Pondlife on the take. The kind that steal from their mothers and display utter apathy when someone pulls a knife in a brawl. The kind of people who aim low and still fuck up. The underclass. Scum.

  A man in a V-neck sweater pushed a woman in an A-line skirt up against the wall of the pub and went at her face like he was bobbing for apples.

  I thought Iain was being a bit harsh.

  By ten o’clock, the pub was jumping. A crowd had spilled on to the street despite the cold, and loud music was pouring out of the doors, along with laughter, shouting and billows of blue smoke. The gas in the heater ran out so I buttoned up my overcoat and decided that if I was going to freeze I might as well do it properly. I stalked about the site trying to follow the progress made on the building since the previous night. Black stains – piss, oil, blood? – decorated one of the partially erected walls and an empty plastic litre bottle of cheap cider stood next to them. Someone had clearly been using a few of the undeveloped rooms to camp in. There was evidence of fires: soot up the walls and on
the ceilings. Presumably the builders had cleared the remains of the fires away, but their smell remained, somehow damp and sour, persistent, like urine.

  There would be none of this on the roads around the café, which sprang into my thoughts, unbidden, or perhaps perversely encouraged by the dearth of positive images that were currently being filtered through them. It was as if the roads around the café were self-cleaning. I thought of Monique and the slope of brown skin under her blouse. Her sing-song voice.

  I mooched around a little longer, keeping an eye on the pub in case it should disgorge someone with a sudden lust for a bit of bloodshed. I was finishing a slow circle, and returning to the Portakabin to make some tea and listen to the radio, when Troake’s Jag turned on to the building site, the beams from its headlights jerkily arcing over the infrastructures and cement mixers until I was fixed within them. I raised a hand to shield my eyes and at that very moment he killed the engine and the light died.

  ‘Adam, isn’t it?’ he said, as he got out of the car. ‘So you do want a job in security. Iain warned me you’d be filling in for him tonight. I’m grateful. It’s rare that we get cover as quickly as that, if at all. How’s it going? Had any adventures yet?’ Troake’s face emerged from the murk: a flat oval underlit by the intensifying coal of his cigarette. He was wearing some flash overcoat right out of the pages of GQ magazine, dark and soft, something with a cool, smooth lining and a label to raise eyebrows. He smiled: a butter-coloured scythe.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But then, isn’t security supposed to be the most boring job in the world?’

  ‘Do you find this boring?’

  ‘It’s hardly taxing to the old brain, is it? And the money doesn’t help much.’

  ‘Anything else in your life?’

  I looked at him, trying to make out if he was taking the piss. ‘Plenty,’ I said, at last.

  He dimpled. ‘Some people don’t. For some people, security is, well, security. It’s a friend to them when they don’t have one. It’s money, shit money, sure, but it pays the bills and puts food in the kids’ mouths. It’s kept some men straight, this job, even though most of the chaps we recruit are bent as bastards.’

  ‘I don’t need the job,’ I said. ‘I’ve got work. I’m doing Iain a favour.’

  ‘Iain,’ Troake said, as if the name was new to him. ‘He needs the job. He’ll say he won’t, but he does.’

  ‘He wants it because it offers him something you don’t get in an office.’ I said. ‘No routine. Mobility. It’s probably saving him a fortune in haemorrhoid cream.’

  Troake smiled again. It was an unnerving smile that failed to shift the skin above the corner of his mouth. It was shark-like. Ungenerous. ‘I don’t think so, son,’ he said. ‘I think he needs the job because it’s the only solid thing in his life. Even Iain himself, he’s diminishing.’

  ‘Diminishing?’

  A huge cheer, the kind of ironic noise you get when you finally sink a ball in pool after about a million misses, flew up from the pub and turned to ice in the air. There was something unpleasant in it. I felt all kinds of bad lifting from the static and living things positioned around me: everything had its own, incipient menace. Everything conveyed a threat.

  ‘That’s right,’ Troake said. He lifted a hand and rubbed at the bandage on his throat. The sound went through me like the squeal of a fork on a plate. ‘He’s like water, that boy. A long stretch of water. Tasteless. Bland. You could look right through him. You know, he told me this job was all he had. He was hanging everything on it. “Pack up, I crack up,” he told me.’

  ‘Whatever that means.’

  ‘He doesn’t feel as though he’s connected to anything. He feels lost.’

  ‘He does now. He’s gone too far. The things he’s found. It’s as if he’s unravelling. The others too. And me – ’

  Troake frowned. ‘What’s this he’s found? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t think you want to know. It’s dangerous, what Iain’s been getting up to. There’re after effects. Side effects. Something.’

  He seemed to be smoking constantly, blue ribbons rising from his face, grey bands striping the air above him, although I couldn’t see a cigarette in his hands. I almost laughed. He was like Valeria, the Fenella Fielding character in Carry on Screaming. Smoke made solid.

  ‘Maybe, after all, it’s linked with Iain’s need for this job. Maybe he sees it as a possible way to reinvent himself, reintroduce himself to the world.’ What I was saying sounded tacked on, badly thought out. Words from someone trying to patch up a mistake he has made.

  A glass smashed. Everything grew very quiet, as if we had somehow emerged into the eye of a storm, just before the other side of hell came to rough us up.

  ‘We all have a capacity for re-birth, son,’ he said, so softly I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly. Danger radiated from him like vapour, like smoke. ‘People make the mistake of waiting till they die before attempting it though. It can happen now. There’s a womb and we all slumber inside it: blind, stupid, smothered by our TV comforts. Nobody ever strives to escape it, nobody wants to better themselves.’

  He dragged on a cigarette that materialised between his fingers. I thought he would make it vanish again, push it into his ear, pull it from his nose. Swallow it. His eyes were pits of amber. The smell of diesel poured off him then, as if he was keeping some in his pockets, or washing with it. His stench was of the underground. And I felt my mouth water for it at the same time as everything became hazy and insane.

  The noises from the pub turned ugly. I heard someone shout, very clearly: ‘You. Are. Fucking. Dead.’

  Troake said: ‘Fancy a pint?’

  I looked at him. ‘I’m on duty.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘You’re sacked. Now you’re off duty. Let’s have a drink.’

  ‘Over there?’ I asked him. ‘You’re joking aren’t you? MacCreadle said – ’

  ‘I don’t give a fanny fart what that overgrown beard said. It’s safe. I’ve supped pints in there a thousand times and haven’t so much as had my change placed roughly in the palm of my hand. Let’s go.’

  The pub didn’t even have a name. The sign hanging over the door was split and rotten, warped like a flag that had frozen solid. Whatever paint had existed there was now scratched away, or obscured with pigeon shit.

  Inside, the heat was tremendous. The serge suit began to prickle against my arms and legs. Heads turned our way. I took off my clip-on tie. I took off my cap. I kept my eyes on the sawdust and floorboards until we were at the bar. A woman with an amazing figure, but an old face pushing through the pancake, pulled us a couple of pints of Spitfire.

  Music lifted from a corner of the room. Bass, drums, guitar, vocals. I didn’t recognise it. It sounded raw and unmannered, but there were so many people between me and it that I couldn’t tell if it was from a juke box or being played live. If there was a band over there, then they were being studiously ignored by the punters. Troake nudged my arm and nodded towards the opposite corner.

  We sat at one of two tables. A woman in a tight T-shirt with the word Lush written across it in pink glitter was sitting on the other, flanked by two men. She had drinks queued up in front of her: half pints of Guinness and black as far as I could tell. The men wore plain, dark suits with colourful shirts, one in maroon, one in electric blue, open to a depth of three buttons. They sported identical French crops shot through with some expensive-looking product that shone dully in the nicotinic light: moisturising wax or putty. A bank of perfume separated us. The woman was saying drunkenly to maroon: ‘I mean it. You get it out, put it on the table. I swear I’ll kiss it.’

  ‘This your local?’ I said to Troake, downing half my pint, and hoping he wasn’t expecting a session to develop.

  I could just make out, through the scrimmage at the bar, a fat man in Puffa jacket and jeans with six-inch turn-ups yelling at a woman whose face was lowered over her glass. She might have been crying. Hot red spots bloomed
on his cheeks above mutton chop whiskers. His eyebrows were arrowing into the centre of his face above a pair of mirror shades. He was pointing at her and pointing at the way out. She hadn’t yet got the message.

  ‘What do you think?’ Troake asked. I turned to him. His mouth was poised over the rim of his glass. Thin foam squiggles formed a code on its sides.

  ‘About what?’ I said.

  ‘The Pusher, hey? All this pushing going on. What do you think?’

  ‘I think he’s a mental fucker who wants to get caught.’

  He took a sip and placed the glass on the table. Names were scratched across its unvarnished wood: Bri, Merce, Barnesy. The woman at the next table said: ‘I don’t know about the both of you. Not at the same time, anyway.’

  ‘You think he wants to get caught?’

  ‘Well, no. It’s a figure of speech, isn’t it? Like “he wants his face slapping”. Or “she wants a good talking to”.’

  ‘Figure of speech,’ Troake said. He hadn’t tapped the ash from his cigarette. It curled off the end like a horn. It looked much harder than it was. I hoped the same could be said for Troake. He was fidgeting now, and licking his lips. We were sitting a comfortable distance apart, but something was being exuded through his skin that was like an affront. It crept into my personal space, jabbing its fingers into the nerves at the centre of my gut. I raised my glass and it trembled.

  The guy with the whiskers was prodding the girl in the chest. She looked up at him. Her face was white; her opened mouth turned it into a Japanese flag. I saw her say please. I saw him show her an open hand. I saw him make to slap her and then hold back at the last moment. Somewhere, someone said: And I’ll fucking slaughter you and all. The woman at the table next to ours put her hands beneath my sight line and kneaded her companions. There was no height for the heat to rise into. It was so intense it was causing itself to sink to its knees. The music turned into a howl of feedback that would not end. The barmaid was turned away from the gaggle of customers waving fivers at her. She was peering into a mirror, digging at something in her face with long, false nails.