London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  God knows how Greg survived.

  I lost the sense of Hampstead Heath having anything beyond the prettifying border of trees at the edge of Parliament Hill. London was framed by their tops, a black, glassy streak of light and jewelled colour. I could feel the life rising off that skyline like a heat haze. I imagined human interaction coming into play in all its sick, fascinating, glorious manifestations. I grew dizzy imagining configurations of metal, concrete and human beings. Cars driven by sacks of offal dressed in Alexander McQueen and Zara. Men and women meeting appointments in squalid high-rise cubes, mating on newspaper-covered floors while dogs whined in corners. The innocent sleep of babies in windows looking on to railway tracks where midnight Tubes ferried deadheads dreaming of a chemical homecoming.

  ‘Better yet?’ asked Nuala, sitting back on the grass with me. I sat dead still, hair in a crazy dance, trying to force myself to calm down. I was struck, looking out at the city, by how everything we did was governed by surfaces. We went through life clinging to the scurvy skin of the Earth, or more, burrowing under it. We were insects, building hives. There was so much sky I felt vertiginous, claustrophobic. Seventy years of inhabiting alleys and caves and you were allotted your own little hole in the ground. Just like all the billions that had gone before you. I groaned and lay back. Nuala moved over me and dropped her mouth on to mine. We were alone on the hill. On the other side, trees hissed like a black tide spilling against the shore. She fumbled with my zip; I got a brief impression of her grinning in the sparse moonlight before she moved down and slowly drew me into her mouth. Lying there, staring up at the dead bowl, I could almost believe that the city had disappeared. My senses were torn between the growing pool of heat spreading from my centre and the howling mass of nothing spinning away from my eyes. With nothing to focus on, my eyes fed on the aimless dark. I was using dead eyes to stare. I imagined following their trajectory, wondering how many millions of miles I would have to travel before I hit something. Couched by the earth, the city’s heart mere miles away, I was cast to the other end of my neurosis, suddenly aware that there were more gaps than solids. I closed my eyes as Nuala worked me, and shuddered as I came, as she created a vacuum, another mini-universe at my core.

  ‘Happy?’ she asked.

  I felt a little better. You can’t help it. It doesn’t matter how low you get, how depressed. A beautiful woman snacking on your nerve centre just because she wants to counts as one of the better experiences you can hope to have. I could no longer see Nuala, she wasn’t even a vague black shape against the restless grain of night.

  ‘I want H. to move in with me,’ she said, with all the gravity of a shopper mumbling the next item on his list. ‘I want our genes to get gooey. I want to get zygote positive. I was hoping that maybe he does too.’

  I didn’t feel as crushed as I thought I might. We weren’t really compatible, me and Nuala. Not in the way that life partners need to be. But the knowledge that she would remain my friend was an overwhelming relief.

  ‘What are you going to call your offspring? I hear “Nut Cutlet” is coming back into vogue. For girls, of course.’

  She kicked me. ‘I’m worried about you, Adam,’ she said, after a while. It was getting cold up on the hill. I had been staring so intently at the scatter of light it was beginning to liquefy and steal all suggestion of shape and form. ‘I understand you feel unattached, in more ways than one. Sometimes, I think, the best way to reassert yourself is to go back to where you started off a new chapter in your life. Make some peace with old connections. Make a clean break where you feel there’s something holding you back. Otherwise, you wrestle with demons all the time in your back brain. You can never let go and move on.’

  ‘You mean Laura, don’t you?’

  ‘You said it. She’s on the tip of your tongue all the time. Spit her out.’

  I tore at the ground with anxious fingers. A murmuring couple moved past us in the dark, their feet swishing through the grass.

  ‘She isn’t coming back, Adam.’

  I knew that. I knew that. But it still scooped a cold little hole from my heart to have it confirmed by someone else. I suppose I’d kept a part of me alive for her, a warm place that would always be ready to take her back into my arms and heal over the rift between us without a moment of doubt. But she wasn’t coming back. The thousands of hours I’d spent with her seemed to rush through me without anything for me to catch hold of.

  One day, though, I remembered clearly. So much rain had fallen that the pavements were like glass. The colour of streetlamps and Christmas lights bled together and disappeared into the gutters. We had been drinking red wine since the early afternoon and decided to go out for a walk. In this kind of dark Laura’s face was grey and soft. She was wearing a hat. As we reached the end of her street the rain began again, lighter now, like a mist furring the skin. She remembered to bring an umbrella.

  She was songs by The Cure; perfume on the collar of my shirt; hot chocolate fudge cake and strawberry lip balm. Her eyes were soft and friendly. Cars hissed by in the rush hour. She kissed me. I remember the two of us sprinting across the road as a bus roared towards us. I remember shadows behind fogged windows and thinking that none of the people on there knew about the woman walking alongside me. Thinking what sad lives they must lead.

  Quick, I said to her, put the umbrella up, I’m getting drenched. The mist was turning into proper rain.

  All right, all right, she said, laughing as she tried to find the catch to release the canopy. When she laughed, she lost control of her legs and weaved all over the pavement. She persevered with the umbrella even though it was in a sorry state. The handle wouldn’t extend properly and the fabric was worn ragged; the spokes bent like the legs of a squashed spider.

  I said to her I can’t believe you’re standing under that thing, it’s much drier out here where I am.

  She laughed harder, almost staggering into the road. The door of a house opened opposite and an elderly couple stepped out. A pair of spacious umbrellas – spectacularly patterned – flew up, rampant against the sky. This set her off again; she leaned against me for support, her breath catching in her chest. The wind found its way beneath the edge of the ragged tartan and sucked it inside out. She clung on, laughing so hard that it looked painful.

  Soaked, we slipped into the all-night shop at the petrol station to buy condoms and chocolate. The cashier was reading a Mills & Boon novel. She took my money, her fingers stained orange by the open packet of Wotsits on the counter. She looked at the umbrella as if she had never seen one before.

  Wet tonight, isn’t it? she said, handing me my change.

  You’ll be lucky, Laura replied, pushing open the door.

  We swapped pieces of chocolate on the way back, heads squeezed together under our sagging umbrella. Her cheek was cold and damp when I kissed it. Her nose was cold and damp when she kissed mine. Looking up, I could see the sky through holes as big as pennies. The light splintered and died away as we drifted away from the main road. Laura squeezed my hand. She sucked chocolate from my fingers.

  Before we closed the door on the night I nipped inside for my camera. I took a photograph of her standing in the rain, smiling, the umbrella falling around her ears. Later there was some wine left, and warm towels. A Cocteau Twins album and melted Mars bars with vanilla ice cream. Later still, in the darkness of her bedroom when she was a warm curve sleeping in my arms, the beat of rain on glass stopped and the bad weather went elsewhere. Now all the buses I caught seem to have misted windows.

  I said to Nuala: ‘I see a lot of broken umbrellas in the road.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. And then: ‘Laura fell for me because of who I was. But by the end, she was beginning to hate me for who I was too. How can people cope when they see two versions of the same person?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said, leaning her head against my arm. ‘I don’t know. But I think it’s damaging to try to understand i
t. It’s just magic, Adam. It’s all just magic.’

  ‘Bad magic,’ I said. ‘What gets me is that I see that in myself. I feel as though I’m two people in one zip-up skin. I sometimes wake up when I clearly haven’t been asleep. I’ll be walking along Kensington High Street, say, when I come to, having last been aware of myself and my surroundings in a pub in Holborn the night before. It’s not just the narcolepsy. I’m sure it’s not.’

  ‘You should be careful,’ she said. ‘London is no place for sleepwalkers.’

  We sat huddled together for a little while longer. Tiredness unwound in me. The hill grew busier, despite the hour. People from parties on the wane, in need of fresh air; the post-club brigade; loners scouting for company, desperation rising from them like heat haze. Someone launched a kite, a great bat-winged thing that glowed in the dark. Candles were lit, a radio was switched on. Laughter broke out in pockets, as if it were something being juggled and tossed between each group. I wondered where Meddie, Yoyo and Iain were tonight.

  Someone close to me struck a match and the flare from it lit up the back of a bench facing the view. The logo that I had been seeing everywhere had been hacked into the wood.

  ‘Nuala,’ I said, ‘Have you seen that?’

  I saw her nod before the match died and we were plunged back into darkness.

  I said, ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘It looks like a bottle,’ she said. ‘A bottle lying on its side.’ And then, whispering: ‘Seek closure, honey.’

  ‘You should be wearing a pair of wings,’ I said.

  I woke up at around 9 a.m. Nuala hadn’t stayed with me. I hadn’t asked. How’s that for adult? I tried Laura on the phone, and then on her mobile, but I only found two versions of her answering service. She often ignored the phone while she was working at home.

  I was going to catch a Tube from Tufnell Park, but Nuala had given me her car keys before kissing me goodnight, saying that I had spent too long underground. It took about forty minutes to drive to Maida Vale; I didn’t mind, because I like driving in London. It totally rejigs your perception of distance and there’s an adrenaline rush there too, if you take pains to drive with a certain degree of recklessness.

  Maida Vale was bathed in the kind of sunshine that makes dog shit attractive. I sat in the car, listening to the engine tick over as a slow, liquid beat slinked from a speaker tied to an upstairs balcony. I could hear someone washing dishes too, an impossibly lovely sound. I imagined Laura, glasses perched on her forehead, drinking a G&T, flicking through the latest BMJ and listening to Messiaen. I had no dread about her reaction when I rang the doorbell. How could we have a bitter scene when there were two cats sitting side by side watching clouds roll across the sky? How could we rekindle the bitterness when an ice cream van moved through a street nearby, playing Greensleeves?

  No answer. Her window was adjacent to the doorstep, but I couldn’t see beyond the wooden blinds she liked to draw if the sunshine was too intrusive. I tapped on the glass. ‘Laura?’

  With a sickening wrench, I imagined her in bed with someone. Before I could stop myself, I had shaken her key free of the bunch in my hand and let myself in. I stood in her hall, disoriented. I could hear no moans from the bedroom, no breathy exaltations to fuck me harder. She had changed things around. There was a painting on the wall opposite the door now. A spider plant in a big blue china pot sprawled by the telephone desk.

  ‘Laura?’

  My feet tapped on the bare wooden floorboards as I moved right, towards the kitchen. I had fucked her in here, while she sat on the edge of the worktop over the washing machine. An omelette burning in the pan; the wine in the glass in her hand sloshing on to the floor.

  A copy of the Independent – the previous day’s – on the drop leaf table. In the sink, a dish with a few salad leaves clinging to it. I was still pinned to her notice board – a photograph of me she had taken outside a pub in Dover, on the morning of a journey to Bruges the previous year. Next to me, there was some grinning stranger. Blond crop-top, rugby sweater with the collars turned up. Jesus. I ducked my head into the bathroom. Same collection of Clinique bottles on the shelf. A framed photo of a dolphin making an arch over water. Old copies of the BMJ on a wooden, paint-spattered stool by the tub and a red pen resting on top.

  I felt dreadful, snooping around. I felt like an intruder, although this had been my home for so long. I had been more intimate, more natural here than anywhere else. Unhappy and wishing I’d stayed with Nuala, I trooped back to the living room, and that’s when I found a room redecorated with blood.

  I couldn’t look at the chair in the centre of it for longer than it took to recognise that the red handprints on it were tiny enough to be Laura’s. I moved around it, looking instead at the books in the bookcase, the new throws over old sofas that had taken my weight for so long and knew me no more. I studied the rose and the cornice and the colour of the walls. I kept moving: the only player in a silent game of musical chairs. There was a lot of blood. Some of it was as bright as a child’s balloon, tacky, but still wet. Some was dark and dry. Something lay on the carpet, like a discarded surgical glove, but with tufts of hair attached to it. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look. I grew colder. I grew older. I got out.

  And all I seemed to notice were the cracks in the pavement, how the whole street was filled with cracks that fled along the roads, up buildings, so many of them it seemed they must transfer to the perfect blue of the sky. Some of the trees along Laura’s road were listing badly, their roots exposed through the pavement as it fragmented. I ignored Nuala’s car and walked, feeling vomit creeping into my craw, and the colours and lights reducing all the time, as if everything had been dipped in bleach

  Up ahead I saw an old woman in big rubber booties standing at the centre of a jagged pile of paving slabs. She was raising her hand to steady herself and looking round her in a bewildered fashion. I hurried over to help her out, but I was in no fit state. It was me who needed her help.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, it just happened like this. I don’t like this one. Yes. it just happened and yes.’

  She wasn’t hurt, but even as she made off, more cracks followed her, like a graph plotting her route.

  I walked until the familiarity of Maida Vale’s streets were behind me. I had no location in mind, I just let myself be carried. As long as it was away, I didn’t care. I didn’t think. I didn’t look around me. All my mind wanted to show me were the fractures in the pavement and a red froth covering Laura’s lips, a hole in her chest where her heart used to be. Knives, thick with blood, as if someone had overdone it on the jam for his toast. Blood on her hands. The blood. That thing, on the floor. I squeezed my hands into fists until my knuckles were white. She wasn’t there; she might still be alive. Hold on to that. Hold on.

  About half an hour later, a strident car horn snapped me back to the here and now: I had wandered on to the A40 where an elevated roundabout connects it to the West Cross Route. Brought to my senses by the growl and hiss of traffic on the Westway, I moved into the glare provided by the powerful floodlights ranged around a synthetic football pitch and a series of artificial climbing walls; giant splinters of textured cement thrusting out of the ground. A game of eight-a-side was going on down there, a red tide of players advancing on a blue team’s goal. I watched one player dance around the ungainly lunges of the defence before letting loose with a twenty-yard left-foot shot. The goalkeeper, in his bright yellow jersey, dived gamely but the shot was too powerful, too accurate. He looked up at me with brilliant eyes, having retrieved the ball from the back of the net, shrugging animatedly. A thin rash of slow hand-clapping.

  I thought, sluggishly: I ought to go to the police.

  It was then that I heard, or rather, felt, a deep vibration, moving through my body like the charge of bass through large speakers at a rock concert. Traffic around me veered and slewed at speed across the Tarmac. The road was tipping; I was spilled against the barrier overlooking the drop on to
the Astroturf. There were sounds of consternation as the players sprinted for safety.

  Three feet away from me, a Sierra slammed into the barrier. A woman behind the wheel followed up her expression of shock with one of panic and pain as a double decker coach piled into the back of her car. I watched as the Sierra folded in two, the woman’s head smearing across the windscreen like a lick of red paint.

  I ran.

  The roundabout crumbled behind me, vast cracks splitting the road in two, carving a path towards the opposite end, which I was endeavouring to reach. The crest of the climbing wall rose above the level of the road; I clambered on to the barrier, which was warping badly now, and flung myself through the air. A pocket of calm, a split second without tremors, afforded me a glimpse of the road as it collapsed on the carriageway beneath it. The sounds of rending metal tore at me as I hit the climbing wall and managed to grab hold of some of the pre-laid pins. It didn’t prevent my fall, but it arrested it; by the time I crashed into the gravel pit below, my body was sliced up like a joint of pork scored by a butcher.

  I lay there for a while, scared to move in case the pain was a mask for something even more serious, and listened to the death of the earthquake. Sirens already moved through the creamy morning; I could hear them through the settling tonnage of concrete, Tarmac and steel. And human shrieks.

  Cautiously, I rose. Managing to pick my way through the newly configured concourse, I tried to see into the sandwich of roads to see if I could pull out any survivors. Cars inside had been crushed; their passengers had no chance. An intense flare of fire lifted into the sky towards Shepherd’s Bush. Smaller explosions thudded around me as the ground discovered fresh levels to settle into and gas pipes ruptured and ignited. A great chasm yawned nearby, sucking in cars, lorries and a Hammersmith & City Line Tube train. The lights went out everywhere. As they did so, a great tide of sound rose from beneath my feet, like a rush of gritty air forced through tunnels. It took me a while to realise that what I heard, but did not see, was a crowd of people cheering. A while longer and it dawned on me that I too was making the same noise…