London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  Greg too needed a cover for him to exist alongside people. Thinking of him made me uneasy, especially since my last visit had proved that his patience with his own deception had worn out. If people didn’t have a mask for their identity, what became of them? How many of us were true to ourselves anyway? How many of us were ever totally natural? When we finally get to be on our own, could it be that long hours of projecting, of society’s conditioning, dilutes us to a point where we can never regain ourselves? The thought shook me. I’d never considered myself to be anything other than just me, but now I could think of dozens of minor incidents where I had chipped away at, or gilded myself in order to make an impression on someone else. I had thought Greg and Nuala poorer for being so blatant in their deception, yet they were handling this problem of identity better than me. They had acknowledged what they had done; I was still coming to terms with it.

  I tried to think of someone I knew who was totally genuine but I couldn’t. People reinvented themselves for different occasions. They dressed in different clothes to combat certain challenges. They wore make-up or had their hair styled. Everyone was constantly making a statement. But it wasn’t so much: This is me as This is how I want to be seen. Who could lay claim to being an authentic person? Babies? But they soon learned how to use people for their benefit. Loners, then. People who didn’t work, never socialised. But they would have had to skip school, escaped their parents at birth, keep themselves isolated while the real person evolved within them. What nonsense. People become who they are because of other people. In order to be ourselves, we have to mix with others. We need human mirrors. So while we’re busy bouncing off other people and finding out who we are, we’re constantly fooled into believing we know ourselves.

  Jesus, no wonder so many people suffered from crises of identity.

  I dried myself off and dressed. Maybe this was Shaun’s failing. He’d tried the conventional route – work, pubs, relationships – and found it wanting. That he’d done what he did to Claire was difficult for me to grasp, but I was able to just cling on to the coat-tails of his desperation. I was able to understand the frustration he felt. Just a little bit. It didn’t mean that he had become trapped on a treadmill that was leading him deeper into violence. It didn’t work that way. Shaun was someone who lashed out; his anger was incendiary, igniting and almost immediately snuffed. It was probably a healthier way to live your life than to keep the resentment locked up. The only problem was that Shaun’s violence was very, very bad. Controlled too, so that even in the conflagration of his fury, he was able to channel the wildness to cool, almost creative ends. He had worked on Claire, not simply laid into her.

  Greg wasn’t answering his phone again. I was about to put the receiver down, having endured a dozen rings, when a voice cut through the static.

  ‘Is Greg around?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, he’s sick. In hospital. I’m the landlord. He owes me rent too, bloody swine.’ I heard him suck his teeth. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Which hospital? What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘If you saw all these bottles you’d know what’s wrong with him. This place is a tip, y’know? Anyway, he’s in the Royal Free, innit. Man, if you is going to visit, you put him in disguise, cos I’m mighty enraged.’

  I put the phone down and went to the window. The street was tooling along as it usually did. Nothing looked out of whack. I felt hunted though. As if I was under constant surveillance. My mother had told me, not long before she died, that she would sometimes wake from her sleep thinking that someone had been in the room with her, watching her intently. It was almost, she had said, ‘like being chased, but by someone who was as still as I was’.

  At the time I thought she was talking nonsense. Not now.

  ‘I know what you mean, Mum,’ I sighed. ‘Me too.’

  Chapter 16

  Event horizon

  I couldn’t raise Iain, and Meddie hadn’t been to work for days. I even popped around to The Pit Stop first thing because she sometimes slept over in the spare room if she had stayed after hours for a lock-in. She had her breakfast in the bar while the cleaners hoovered around her. Bacon sandwiches. Tar-strong coffee. Marlboro Red. Heat or Hello!, Time Out or Take a Break.

  No, we ain’t seen her for ages, my dear. What are you, her sweetheart or what? She deserves a sweetheart that one. Lovely lass.

  I even called Ilse, the girl Iain had tried to get off with in the pub, but she was sick of the sight of all of them, especially that Iain twat – Doesn’t he get the message? I called… there was nobody left to call. That was it where Meddie’s sphere of influence lay, at least the one that I knew of.

  I caught a bus over to Yoyo’s. She wasn’t answering her phone either, but I was happier chasing after her than I was Iain.

  Early evening. Low sun turning the cement of the high-rise a dark amber. You get off the bus and the smell isn’t of the city at all, it’s of clean air, fresh and cold, the kind that puts you in mind of a childhood spent out of town, in woods and fields, hunting for conkers, chestnut-picking, a Sunday morning playing football at Cherry Tree Farm where the smells of wintergreen and mud on football boots is somehow a part of the magic. It’s a smell that the city borrows, magics out of nowhere, maybe once or twice a year. It broadsides you, along with the paint box sunset, and you suddenly feel the city’s power, its beauty, its pull. Every city has its pull. Every city is a black hole, drawing you in, drawing you towards an unknowable singularity.

  I climbed the stairwells until I came to her floor. Graffiti — amateurish tags, silvers, bombings — tongued the brickwork, robbing it of its natural colour, all the way along the corridor. I stopped in front of Yoyo’s door and listened. An argument was raging in one of the flats on either side of hers, and someone on the floor below had a stereo ramped up: Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Last Beat of My Heart. The bass thudded through my feet. It didn’t exactly help me to relax.

  I knocked on the door three or four times over the next five minutes. Waiting, listening. The argument stopped, to be replaced by the sounds of repeated slamming against the door, a man grunting and a woman coming. I shuffled my feet and knocked again, bent over to have a peek through the letterbox. Unopened post scattered on the floor. Deeper into the flat, grainy darkness, but at the centre of it a pale oval, a lamp, maybe, with a very low wattage bulb.

  ‘Yoyo?’ I called to it. Light, shade, light again. Someone was inside the flat, moving through it. ‘Yoyo?’

  I turned, looked out towards the Paddington Basin. The sun had disappeared beneath the rim of the city and the sky was a bruise of blues and purples, even greens. The woman stopped moaning and a few minutes later there came the sounds of plates in a sink. There might have been none of what I thought was happening actually going on: it could just be a single occupant listening to a CD called Domesticity. Track 1: Argument; Track 2: Fucking; Track 3: Washing-up. I quite fancied a spot of washing-up at that moment. Washing-up seemed like the most wondrous task imaginable next to what I was doing.

  I knocked again.

  Yoyo said, ‘Go away.’ Her voice was tired. Suicide tired. I imagined her sitting alone on the sofa, daydreaming of Saskia broken open on a wet road. How long would you have to go, how lost would you have to be before you found that attractive, desirable? How tired?

  ‘Yoyo,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Come out to play. Come on.’

  ‘I can’t, Adam. I can’t.’

  I smelled stale pizza, stale curry. Delivery life. I smelled the kind of air breathed into and out of a person who hasn’t known any fresh for days, maybe weeks. I wondered when she had last stepped out on to this corridor. When had she last eaten something she didn’t dial up for?

  ‘I’ll buy you a steak,’ I said. ‘Steak and salad and a big glass of red wine.’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘Ice cream. And then we’ll go for a walk. Hyde Park at night is beautiful. Because you can’t see the dog shit you’re treading in.’

  ‘Adam. I can’
t.’

  ‘Then what?’

  A beat. ‘Then… wait.’

  I waited. Darkness came on. The paint-sprayed nonsense on the brickwork faded to grey gleams. I heard footsteps on the lino. Slippered feet. She opened the door. Her face in the crack: one eye, the corner of her mouth. She was wearing one of her floppy hats.

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ she said. ‘But nowhere busy. I don’t want people.’

  ‘Then let’s go for a drive,’ I said.

  She was painfully slow leaving the flat. She had lost weight. Her duffel coat seemed to weigh her down. Beneath it she wore pyjamas stained with gravy. She had not changed out of her slippers. There was a book, of course there was a book, peeking out of her pocket. I caught a picture of a woman standing before the sun, lifting her arms to it, a great mane of black hair cascading down her naked back. A title: Goodbye Girl.

  I drove. She said, ‘I was in the bath earlier. I found the mouth parts of an insect embedded in the flesh of my thigh.’

  That nearly had the Yaris into the back of a Bedford Transit van before I’d made third gear.

  She said, ‘You know that on Earth, there are about one and a half million species of animal that we know about? That we’ve named? A million of those are insects. Thousands of new species of insect are found every year. There could be up to thirty, that’s trente, that’s dreizig million species still undiscovered. They reckon that the number of insects in one square mile equals the world population. People, that is.’

  I kept quiet, concentrated on the traffic. I didn’t know where to take her, like this. I felt we should walk somewhere, but in London, where can you walk where there are no people? Sometimes it felt that there were more people in London than insects in a square mile.

  ‘Just think,’ she said. ‘In summer, my windows open, I might have the insect equivalent population of London in my living room.’

  ‘What bit you?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice full of interest, as if we were discussing the plot of one of the books she was reading. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was an undiscovered insect?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Smashing.’

  ‘I can’t get it out. And I don’t know how long it’s been in there. It could have been there for years.’

  ‘Maybe you should see a doctor. Maybe it could go bad. Infect you. Jesus, you’ve got an insect’s mouth, its filthy mouth in you. What was it eating before it ate you? Jesus.’

  ‘Oh stop it, Ads,’ she said. Humour, strength was coming back to her voice. She was looking around her, at the lights and the people on Park Lane. She wound the window down. Fresh air, still that magical hit of fresh air, even here, in Toxic City Central. ‘I looked it up in an encyclopaedia. Insect mouth parts. I saw the mandible, the labrum, the maxilla. No glossa, though.’

  ‘Glossa?’

  She turned and stuck her tongue out at me, waggled it lasciviously.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said again. ‘Still, it could be worse. You could have an insect’s arse trapped in your skin.’

  She laughed. ‘Do you want to see it?’

  I shook my head, took the car into Mayfair, towards Piccadilly.

  ‘Let’s go to the river,’ she said. ‘I want to see the river.’

  So we turned south.

  ‘How did your mother die?’ she asked.

  I’d parked the Yaris on the south side of the Waterloo Bridge. Now we were standing on the South Bank, in front of the National Film Theatre, watching the flux of lights in the Thames. Behind us, people were crammed on to the tables outside the café. Someone was playing a violin. From further away came the clatter and cries of kids skateboarding.

  Although it was the first time I had told anyone, it felt as though I had never said anything else. It felt scripted. And maybe it was, by me, at some deep level all that time ago.

  ‘Aneurysm,’ I said. ‘Right in the middle of her brain. Congenital. Nobody knew about it until it was too late. Not that it could have been operated on anyway. She was in her bedroom, and she was wearing a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and one of my dad’s extra large Ted Baker shirts. Her hair was tied back with a pencil, you know, through the knot, however it is that women manage to do that. She was barefoot. She wore a silver band around one toe, a present from a friend who had been to Bali. There was a glass of homemade lemonade next to her. It was a Sunday afternoon. She was listening to Sing Something Simple on Radio 2. She was writing a letter to her sister, Ursula, who was living in Australia at the time. Perth. They were slowly arranging a visit. Her there, or Ursula here, I can’t remember. This letter. I’ve got it. It begins Dear Bear, I hope you’re well, was able to escape from the nasty cold you said was making its way around your neighbours. Robert is well and as we speak is in the garden setting fire to whatever he can lay his hands on. Adam is fine too, reading lots this summer, he looks

  ‘And that’s where it happened. Bang. It did what it did and she died. Dad found her sitting upright in her chair, the pen still in her hand, poised over the space next to the last word she wrote. It must be one of the tidiest deaths ever. Typical Mum.

  ‘I’ve spent so much time. Too much time. Trying to work out how she was going to end that sentence.’

  Yoyo opened her duffel coat. ‘Come here, friend,’ she said. She wrapped me inside it and we hugged each other for a long time.

  And then… Then we were out on the water.

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘I told you. There’s this seam. You can walk along it. From the bank it would look as if we were walking on water.’

  A barge glided past us, twenty feet away; its wash dashed against my legs. ‘Yoyo,’ I said, ‘we are walking on water.’

  ‘Imagine the shit swimming through this,’ she said, and pinched my arm. ‘What if something was attracted to my insect mouth? I don’t fancy walking around with half a fish sticking out of my leg.’

  ‘Do you have bruises too?’ I asked.

  She nodded and lifted her pyjama top: a ring of black, fist-sized rounds — as if she had been bitten by some immense mouth and then spat out again — looped across her breasts. ‘They don’t hurt,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said, and showed her the fouled part of my own chest. ‘It feels tender though. It feels like bin bag plastic stretched too tightly. It feel as though it might tear if I press too hard.’

  I looked down at the water. Where my legs ended at the ankle, the venerable old river took over. It was as if it began at some point on me, in me. As if we were part of the same body. The lights jinked and skittered across the oily surface, idiot patterns that seemed to signify meaning: fizzing neon ideograms. One of them, I thought one of them said come on in. Beyond them, I thought I saw real movement, physical activity unfolding in jerky stop motion cuts.

  I saw something blast through rock, a sliver of light for a fraction of a second: and then the river jolted around us and began to pour into the centre of the world.

  I said, ‘I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, anyone I’d rather be with.’

  Yoyo said: ‘It’s freezing out here. Let’s get some hot chocolate.’

  Chapter 17

  Chthonic boom

  The tracks sent their snake messages of oncoming traffic. Blue light slashed across the tunnel’s lip. I imagined my feet positioned on the faded yellow D and G of the MIND THE GAP sign, tensing as the electronic voice reminded me to do what I was standing on. People crowded me, jostling at my shoulders. The air changed in the second before I was pushed in front of the squared-off snout of the train, racked with forces that sucked its stale presence from my mouth. I registered the shock of the driver as his hand flew from its grip on the dead man’s handle. I plunged towards the suicide pit, arms pinwheeling when the train struck me and mashed me into the rails like a slab of sausage meat under a rolling pin.

  ‘You, Adam,’ came Nuala’s voice, sinking out of the hot shadows above my duvet, ‘are a tripwire man. I can’t say anything, touch you anywher
e, reach out for you without some skewed connection taking place, some switch being thrown that turns you into raw meat. It’s as if you’ve been flayed, your soul exposed, you’re being rubbed out with every breath of air.’

  ‘Do something to help me then,’ I said, my voice like the tremble of an onionskin page. ‘Bash me round my superstition nodes with your karma chameleon, why don’t you?’

  ‘Come on,’ she said, pulling my hand. ‘We’ll get you some fresh air.’

  It was just shy of two a.m.

  I’d visited Greg earlier, after I’d escorted Yoyo home, and been shocked by what I saw. He was hooked up to an IV but all the tubes and flickering LCDs weren’t the problem. Neither was it the thick dressings covering both wrists, the faint crimson bloom that was beginning to spoil their starched whiteness. It was the way he resembled a little boy. His hair had been combed in a way he never had it, side parting, long hanks tucked behind the ears. He looked utterly un-Greg like.

  ‘Why, mate?’ I asked. Greg’s eyelids fluttered and lifted to reveal clouded marbles.

  ‘I don’t know who I am,’ he said. And drifted off again.

  I sat with him for half an hour, wanting to touch his arm but worried that it might cause him pain. I became too aware of the acute lighting, the ammoniac rape of my nostrils. I had run from the ward, imagining the skin of his face slackening as a boning knife turned his forearms to bloody strips. He had needed something to help him on his way: Suede’s The Hollywood Life at full blast on a constant loop. The landlord, living below him, had broken the door down and walked in on a bath full of mince. Part of me hoped that it was some kind of sleep trick I was playing on myself, in the same way that I had imagined Saskia’s death. But there were no jolts to suggest I had wandered off the real road. No coming to in gutters with the freezing rain dashing into my eyes. No alternatives.