London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  Lucas passed me a beer and we moved towards the sound system, stepping over people or ducking the outcrops of masonry. A woman drinking from a bottle of cider frowned almost imperceptibly when I caught her eye. I smiled at her and she smiled back, then withdrew into the black stole wrapped around her shoulders and the man who held it.

  ‘Who’s she?’ I asked Lucas.

  ‘Dunno, but she looks familiar. Maybe she reads the regional news on TV. Come on, let’s see if we can get some more beers that are colder than this piss.’

  ‘Do you know anyone here?’

  ‘Of course. How would I know about it if nobody invited me? Relax, will you?’

  Lucas had a word with the DJ, who was standing behind his turntable and speakers like someone from an underground organisation about to make a speech. His face was as stiff as a mask as he put on some more of the brittle, discomfiting music – which I now recognised as Triangle – that only helped to increase the strangeness of the atmosphere. There was a large metal bathtub behind the DJ filled with ice. Bottlenecks poked out of it.

  ‘Someone tried to kill me last night,’ I found myself saying to Lucas, even though I hardly knew him. The compulsion to do so came from a tricky part of me that wanted to gauge his reaction, almost as if I suspected him for the attempt on my life.

  He didn’t look shocked, but some people never do. He swigged on his beer and suggested I paid. I handed some money over to the DJ and took a long pull on my own bottle, relishing the cold that somehow helped to push back some of the strangeness of our surroundings. Just a cellar. Just people. No reason to feel so edgy.

  ‘People get killed every day. I could take you to meet friends of mine, in this city, who have witnessed murders.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, not exactly sure why.

  He nodded, then shrugged. ‘‘S’okay,’ he said. ‘People die. I need to go to the bog. Look out.’

  I watched him snake through the tight knots of bodies towards a misted patio window. Then he was gone, into the basement garden, which I could see nothing of, though I could hear a fountain splashing into a pond.

  I finished my beer and paid for another and then went for a wander around. Everyone was air kissing everyone else. Or exchanging business cards. Or whispering. Whenever I tried to make inroads on someone’s conversation the three or four would move closer together. One guy wearing a bandanna and reflective shades and a goatee even apologised before standing right in front of me.

  Lucas was taking his time.

  I was looking at the non-existent pictures on the wall when I felt someone grip my arm. Before I had chance to turn and see who it was, she was drifting back into the shadows, her hair in her eyes but her eyes unblinking, upon me like chips of slate buried in ice.

  I went to her – it was the woman in the stole – and she took my hand. Hers felt clammy and unclean. I looked down and it was coated with dust and grit. Her hair too was streaked with grime. I thought she must have crashed the party. Or just crashed. ‘Raglan got you here, then.’ She pressed something cold and metallic and heavy into my hand. ‘You left this behind,’ she said.

  She’d only given me a knife. A big bastard. ‘Behind where?’ I asked, but she only shook her head. She kissed me on the mouth, so savagely it was almost an assault.

  ‘Do the job,’ she said. ‘Get it finished.’

  The man she was with was chewing something. Gum, maybe. Maybe his own lip. ‘Vane! We have to go. Now.’

  ‘Get it finished,’ she said again, and: ‘There’s rumour going round that he’s using the dead zones when he’s not pushing. Check them all. And watch out for his followers. He’s recruiting more and more. At least a dozen now, that we know of.’ She smiled. Touched my face. ‘Don’t stay up too long.’ And then she hurried away with her partner.

  I made to follow, confused, scared, but Lucas was back, telling me to calm it or we’d get thrown out. He bundled me into the garden and sat me by the pond. In the light from the underwater spots, I could see the word Monck inscribed on the wooden handle of the knife. The name tickled at something at the back of my head. Monck. Monck. I knew that name. The knife was an ugly thing with a fat, serrated blade. It was designed to kill things, simple as that. You didn’t dice carrots with this fucker.

  ‘Yours?’ asked Lucas.

  ‘It is now,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want it. You want it?’

  ‘Got my own. You should keep it. Self defence in case your friend has another go at you.’

  ‘Who was that woman?’ I asked again, feeling with a warm thrill how the handle of the knife melded itself to my fingers, as if it had been fashioned with them in mind.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and then: ‘but I kind of think I do. If that doesn’t seem too weird.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, noticing the way my pulse was tripping madly through my wrists. ‘Does the name Raglan mean anything to you?’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course it does.’

  ‘What?’

  He blinked. Opened his mouth. Shut it again. ‘I don’t know. It feels like something half remembered. Like a word you know, on the tip of your tongue, but it won’t come. It won’t come.’

  I said: ‘Do you know a guy called Troake?’ I don’t know why I asked him that. How could he? Troake was from a different circle to Lucas’s, and the two weren’t part of any Venn diagram.

  ‘What his real name?’

  I stared at him. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Lucas laughed, somewhat scratchily. ‘I don’t fucking know.’

  We started drinking heavily then, partly to stop us from getting too weird with each other, but also to try to achieve a state in which I might be able to understand what we had been talking about. I certainly hadn’t been dreaming the previous night, although I connected with Lucas’ vagueness, remembering the night I’d spent with Nuala then gone for a walk, after which I couldn’t remember a thing. Blaming it on narcolepsy didn’t seem to be good enough any more.

  We split up at one point and I didn’t see him again that night. Inside, the clusters of people had become warmer and more migratory and I moved among them, stopping here and there to make small talk.

  ‘Hello. It’s a hummingbird,’ said one girl. ‘I’m Pia. As in Zadora.’

  ‘As in Pakistan International Airlines?’ I offered and, give her credit, she didn’t tell me to fuck off.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ she tried, ladling on just the right amount of confused recognition to confuse me utterly. Maybe she did and she was genuinely trying to fit a name to the face. Maybe she didn’t and she wanted to fit her face to mine.

  ‘Don’t know any Pias,’ I said, thankfully binning my witty coda: unless you count Brighton. How much had I drunk? It obviously wasn’t enough.

  ‘I didn’t ask if you knew me.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, losing my temper, ‘how am I supposed to know if you know me?’

  ‘Good question. And I’m going to answer it by doing something I don’t usually do.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘By talking some sense?’

  She kissed me. I saw her as though through a fisheye lens, her face enveloping mine: her eyes thick with kohl, growing concave and vulpine, her brownish mouth running to a slit, gumming at me like a fish at the hook. In the last moment I saw it broaden, her tongue slide forward as she moved against me. I felt her breasts, hard as rocks, crush against my chest. I went to raise my bottle to my lips, but my addled brain took some time realising that they were already being used for something else.

  When she’d finished, she moved away, her expression even more confused. ‘I do know you,’ she said. ‘I just can’t place it. I’ve kissed you before. In the dark too. Which clubs do you go to?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. We laughed politely.

  Something in her tenderness had struck a chord, but I was sure I’d remember such a full on kiss as she’d just given. I felt more like somebody else, as if someone was borrowing my skin and I was a cipher fo
r their experiences. She reminded me of someone, although she seemed removed from my immediate recognition of people. She was like someone I’d known many years ago, or someone I’d invented in a dream.

  We talked a while longer – shared a few bottles of beer – and then she said something strange which nonetheless pressed a few buttons with me.

  ‘I feel like I’m in a way station,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I nodded. ‘But I don’t know what we’re supposed to be in between.’

  She laughed and kissed me again. Lucas still hadn’t come back. Half-moons of filth were crammed beneath her nails. She was vampire-pale.

  ‘Somebody gave me a knife,’ I said.

  ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

  ‘Not sure,’ I replied, a new wave of alcohol breaking itself upon the tide-worn shores of my head. ‘But it surprises the tits off me.’

  The party went on and people smeared into each other. I lost Pia to the stream of bodies. I thought I heard conversations about faces and rogues but when I merged with a group of intent-looking guests, they seemed to lose the thread of their involvement with each other. They looked suddenly lost, as if I were a fresh integer come to unsettle their code.

  I heard the doorbell above the clamour and wondered if it was Nuala. I watched the hatch for signs of new arrivals but nobody came. I decided to go and investigate; if it wasn’t Nuala, then it was time to go anyway. As I was climbing to ground level, the lights went off. I heard Pia’s voice behind me: ‘Be careful, Monck!’ Again, I experienced a strange little bend inside my head. I knew Pia, or at least I knew her by another name that I couldn’t now place. I felt as if I knew her more deeply than I was letting on to myself. As if I had been involved with her – was involved with her – at some secret level. And then I was in the hallway, and it was empty. Nobody shrugging off a coat and handing a bottle to the host. No sounds of drinks being prepared in the kitchen. There was a creak on the stairs.

  I tried the hallway light but the power was still out. Beyond the opaque glass in the front door I could see the cut had reached further than this one house. Car horns blared in the distance.

  ‘Nuala?’ I whispered.

  Another creak. The sound of a door handle being turned. Footsteps on a carpet. Springs on a bed realigning themselves to the weight of someone sitting. The rasp of a match. Silence: the sound of someone waiting.

  I was halfway up the stairs, my eyes becoming accustomed to the murk – framed photographs on the wall followed the angle of the stairway; a white dressing gown hanging over the banister – when another, momentary, unmistakeable sound, that of a length of chain clinking against itself, unspooled across the landing.

  I stopped and put out a hand. Smooth, cool wallpaper and the thrum of traffic, of cars and underground trains, moved through it, into me.

  Without turning, I took a step back down the stairs. Beneath me I heard the hatch shift. More guests leaving, I hoped.

  ‘Monck,’ came the voice, crippled by the stuff it was drawing into its lungs. ‘The inbetweeners. There aren’t that many of us around. The ones you met tonight: Raglan, Pia, even Vane, they’re weak. This is your last chance.’

  I took another step. Stopped. Began to descend.

  He said, ‘As you can see, it is easy to find you. So easy. It isn’t just me looking for you. There are others. Think about that. Do you want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder?’ He said no more.

  I lurched downstairs and stumbled over a couple having sex against the wall. I knocked over a telephone table. A plate smashed. Keys and coins rattled across the floorboards. I headed into a room next to the kitchen and stood still, trying to let peace return. But it wouldn’t. Danger pressed in, as if this was some weird film set with collapsing walls. One moment I was standing in the centre of a cluster of coats and murmurs, the next, I was

  scampering along the tunnel, Monck ignored the litter ghosts rising on currents of warm air, the rats, the distant thunder of trains. His senses were primed for other, more subtle signals. His knife was out, though he couldn’t remember where he’d come by it. He seemed to have been running for an age, but his lungs were up to it. The burn in them was a comfort to him. It meant life, after all. He’d stolen a ride from Lancaster Gate, train-surfing the Central Line to Holborn, where he had switched to this abandoned offshoot of the Piccadilly Line.

  ‘Blore,’ he whispered, then louder: ‘Blore!’ The name ricocheted lazily off the dirty, curved walls. There was no answer. He’d heard rumour that one of his lairs was down here, somewhere along the disused portion of tunnel that terminated at the dead station Aldwych. The only illumination came from the lamp clutched under his arm, filched from a worksite somewhere around Queensway; it spilled a manic, inaccurate clown light that picked out movement in the walls where Monck reasoned there could be none. His boots gritted in the dust-packed mess between the rails. He checked each emergency duct, each ventilation shaft. Most of them were tightly locked or nailed shut. Others had become nests for rats; he could see their baleful eyes fixing him when he stepped too close. It was unnerving, seeing such creatures display a total lack of concern for him. He hoped they would not be the only ones.

  After another ten minutes of fruitless poking around, he was ready to give up on the tunnel, when he reached a short platform. The bull’s-eye Tube sign on the wall read Strand. The platform was strewn with paint pots, brushes and rolls of masking tape. A ladder, a spirit level and several large plastic buckets had also been left behind. It looked as though the platform was still being used by underground staff testing new finishes for Southwark’s station: a section of the naked wall had been filled in with trompe l’oeils: columns and freshly painted backgrounds with that station’s Tube sign featuring predominantly. Part of the platform floor had been retiled with primrose and blue diamonds; part was a dark, military grey with pastel shades hop-scotching randomly through it. Something about the Tube stop’s stillness, its unfinished appearance, its inbetween-ness, made him hang back a while; he didn’t like it. Blore’s smell was all over the place.

  Monck doused the lamp and allowed his eyes to become accustomed to the fresh dark. Stealthily, he leapt up on to the platform, removing the lamp from his shoulder and leaving it by the mouth of the tunnel. He edged forward, head cocked for new sounds that might alert him to Blore’s presence.

  Always moving, he left the exposed stretch of platform – buffers signalled the end of the line up ahead – and entered the corridor that led to a stairwell up to the surface. A door to his left swung on its hinges. The grime encrusted sign on it read Sub Station. Inside, every surface was piled with about an inch of dust. A newspaper from 1979 celebrated the FA Cup final win by Arsenal over Manchester United. The walls were adorned with pictures of nude women with their names scrawled beneath in lurid green typefaces – Roberta Pedon, Uschi Digart, Janet Lupo – heavily breasted, heavily made-up, their hairstyles thirty years out of date: delta sweeps, held viciously fast by hairspray. Does she or doesn’t she?

  At the other end of the room was another door leading into a narrow corridor that rose at a steep angle to a walkway over the tunnel. The ceiling was spaghetti: defunct wires and cables that had once carried power. Without pause, he delved into the corridor and followed its path until his breath came in white gusts and his fingers turned numb. He could smell violence in the air. At the end of the corridor, a junction. Turn left and after fifty metres he was met by a great clutter of folders, files and dented cabinets, chairs with broken casters, cracked desks. He doubled back and found himself flanked by large grilles that looked on to the tracks. He was standing on the ceiling of the station. Hunkering down, he found the desiccated remains of small mammals and doodles scratched into the paintwork of the corridor with chunks of glass. Blore had been here, he knew it. But it was old Blore he was smelling. Smart man – he’d moved on.

  In his anger and frustration, Monck pulled the knife from his waistband and drove it into the mesh
. The squeal of metals greeting each other shivered away down the tunnel.

  I caught the Tube to Archway, gazing out of the windows, as I usually did, for a glimpse of South Kentish Town’s disused station as we rattled north, or maybe even the Fleet, which the Tube stop traversed. Three figures, palely lit – maintenance men I assumed – watched the train go by foot the foot of a stairwell. I saw only the shape of their bodies: their heads had been twisted off by the dark.

  There were thirty or forty of these limbo stations beneath the city. Lonely platforms, dead staircases, gutted lift shafts. Places that had once known thousands of feet a day now knew none, none that were human at least, beyond the plod of staff, or the occasional guided tour. This is how it used to be. This is how we were. How many more souterrains? How many more secrets could a city keep before it collapsed under the weight of them all? How strong could a city built on a honeycomb be?

  Sometimes I felt like a disused Tube station. Thinking about Tube stations had led to me thinking about Greg. Greg was an irritating traveller to accompany. He ran everywhere when he was underground, possibly to show off his knowledge of the labyrinth. He never consulted a member of staff, or a Tube map. He always knew which carriage to stand in front of at one station in order to be nearest to the exit at his destination. He trotted up and down the escalators. He never took a seat, either on the platform or on the train, even if the carriages were empty. He charged for trains when their doors were closing. I had been left behind on many occasions.

  I’d been worried about Greg ever since receiving that letter from him. It seemed too jolly, too over-the-top excited with life. He hadn’t called me for breakfast, he hadn’t called to crow about his experiences at the Groucho with producers and celebrities. I was beginning to miss his crude humour and the hilarious air of other-worldliness he carried about him.