London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  It took a long time to reach unspoilt pavement. Near Paddington station, where the Ranelagh and Westbourne bridges had buckled and twisted like the deformed spines of dinosaurs, I paused for breath and made better time over a relatively level surface. I padded down on to the road, surrounded by a new topography of urban mesas and buttes created from mangled traffic and the erupted complex of the Paddington Basin; a horizon filled with crippled buildings. Fire swarmed through this, settling on anything that would burn like strange scavengers. Occasionally I saw bodies and had to turn away, but my shock had not yet managed to reach the plimsoll line of my tolerance; the sight of blood in Laura’s flat had inured me.

  A skein of military helicopters arrowed in towards London’s centre, searchlights scouring the wreckage. The clatter of their rotors cut across the sounds of the disaster for a while, so that when the screams and the crackle of fires, the collapse of timber and masonry finally returned, they startled me. The ground was level only for another fifty metres or so. A flattened stretch of land, like a de-militarised zone, had separated me from the rest of the city. Cracks in the ground fell away, sucking the light out like something with a great hunger. Paramedics tried to get stretchers down the trenches to people who would be better off being carried away in several small jam jars. Policemen stood around ineffectually, jabbering into radios, utility belts jangling with so many impotent accessories. I picked my way by them, wondering where I was going. Nuala. That’s where. Hopefully she was all right; hopefully she hadn’t been folded into the ground by the tremors that even now were still shaking London like a pair of giant hands panning for gold in the sieve of the city. I wanted to tell Nuala what had happened to Laura. Like that really mattered now. Like that was headline news.

  I laughed bitterly until I vomited, and, once I had wiped away the crud from my nose and mouth, felt somehow lighter, unblocked. It meant I could cry and cry, out here in the daylight, clinging to the shattered remains of Paddington police station.

  Feeling sick, feeling dizzy, I lay back into the soil, wishing it would suck me down too, and thought: Laura.

  Chapter 18

  Tubeway army

  It was getting dark as I traipsed back along my street, picking a way through the eruptions and collapses, somehow knowing that I lived here but finding no feature to distinguish Tufnell Park from the demolition behind Marylebone Road or the mess that was now Camden Town. My long trek home had been punctuated by a brief adventure in Regent’s Park, where London Zoo had been levelled by the quake; wild animals were moving through the gloaming in a daze. A giraffe galloped as if in slow motion, something graceful among the madness. I almost screamed with shock when I saw two lions scything through the grass after a wide-eyed eland, and stood petrified until they vanished behind Regent’s College, to the north of the Inner Circle. By the time I had reached Albany Street, I was being sedately pursued by a camel and an Indian elephant. They were soon impeded by the range of broken cars, buses and lorries piled up along what had once been the main road. I had kept on in a vaguely northern direction, drained and papery-mouthed with shock and exertion. Every so often I stopped to laugh or cry, or try to make sense of the violent new landscape as I made my way through NW1.

  But finally, I was there. I had long given up any hope of seeing Nuala. I had a feeling that if she hadn’t been buried under twenty tons of rubble she’d have escaped somewhere a little less spiritually taxing.

  I shook my front-door key free of the bunch, pocketing the whole lot again rapidly when it transpired that I no longer had a front door. I went in through a failed wall of half-bricks and plaster dust, tearing away a few lengths of splintered timber to gain access to the hall. My flat had been looted already; my TV and stereo were gone. Someone had Blu-Tacked an old A-ha CD to the bathroom wall and written OH DEAR in shaving foam beneath it. I thought fair play to them, thieves with a sense of humour, and stood giggling at it until the mobile phone brought me out of my hysteria.

  It was Dad, asking me if I was all right. He’d seen the news and had been trying to get through to me for hours. The phone lines had come down but he always kept an updated record of my numbers on a laminated sheet tacked to his study wall.

  ‘It was like the first time you moved down to London,’ he said, his voice fading in and out, so crackly I could hardly tell it was him. ‘I couldn’t get in touch with you for ages.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘It’s not important, I’m talking to you now. That’s what matters. But I was tempted to come down there and find you.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘My place is a little scuffed up, not as bad as the city centre.’

  ‘You’ve been to have a look?’

  ‘God, no. It’s too dangerous. But I can see it from here… what’s left of it. The BT tower’s gone. But it seems fairly localised.’

  ‘Jesus, Adam,’ my dad whispered. ‘You sound so laid back about this. There’s been an earthquake, for God’s sake. London is trashed. You could have been killed.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘it must just be shock. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Come home,’ he said.

  ‘I would if I could, believe me. But it would take me two days to walk up to the M1 to cadge a lift. It’s an obstacle course, this place.’

  I continued to assure Dad that all was well, even when he asked me about Nuala. Hearing her name refreshed my concern for her. I gabbled a goodbye and slipped the mobile into my back pocket. Next door, I navigated my way through the small hills of rubble but couldn’t see anything of Nuala. I tried calling her name but nothing came up from the ground save a gurgle from broken drains. Whatever was underneath all that devastation wasn’t coming out alive.

  I realised I was flailing for human contact, a spinning top desperate for something to bounce off, something to slow me down. I stood in the street for five minutes, waiting for a bus that would never come. Anyone I might have been able to talk to was half a day’s march away.

  Unless I used the tunnels.

  Just thinking about them brought me out in a cold sweat. But I didn’t have an awful lot of choice. I dived in at Tufnell Park Tube and stumbled through the collapsed ticket barrier. In the deserted office I found a torch, which I pocketed as I approached the escalators. I managed to pick a way through yards of warped steel and get on to the Southbound platform, where the damage wasn’t so bad. At least the tunnel was relatively clear, although a portion of the arch had fallen into the entrance. The air down there, thick and muggy, made me feel sick. I bit my cheek hard in an attempt to stop myself from fainting, then

  Monck hopped down into the suicide pit and jogged to the tunnel proper, where he vaulted on to the track and headed into the darkness. The beam from the torch jerked around the curved walls as he ran, making what he saw seem soft, unreliable. He didn’t know why he was carrying the torch – he didn’t really need it, able as he was to navigate by sound and smell in these tunnels and ducts that he knew inside out – but he kept it on anyway, enjoying its play of light.

  He made good time and, but for a few minor collapses, didn’t run into any serious impediments. The tunnel moaned around him, taking the strain of the quake on its fragile shoulders. He wished he knew its language, could find a way of communicating with the earth and its beautiful souterrains, to reassure them, to urge them to hang on.

  At the fork of Camden Town, he changed on to the Edgware branch and set off north, but a hundred metres in he saw that his good luck had run out. A substantial portion of the ceiling had been downed, partially crushing a train. He managed to worm himself through the first few feet of wreckage, trying hard not to notice the bodies that had been sheared apart in the accident, or the great splashes of blood painting the interiors, but he soon realised that if he was to progress, he would need to get inside the train and walk through it, where space was more generous than outside. This he did, smashing in a window with handfuls of concrete, and pulled himself into th
e lap of a headless woman. The book she had been reading was still firmly clasped between her hands. A phone number was written on the back of one of them. Among the blood on the page he read a line of text: Things which are too big to forget.

  He moved slowly through the carnage, trying not to step on the soft parts that had collected in the aisle. Blood ran sluggishly along the grooves in the wooden floor. He didn’t come across any survivors.

  It took twenty minutes to reach the front of the carriage; there was a window already smashed for him to climb through, broken by the force of a male body that had been slammed against it and remained, partially within the frame, a belt of shards almost halving him.

  He heard voices once he was back on the track, skating down at him from distance. He waited until they had disappeared and struck north once more, looking back at the driver’s cabin and training the torchlight upon the roof, shattered by countless tons of rock piled on top of it.

  He shuddered, picked up his pace. At Belsize Park, not quite knowing why, and grimacing as the poor, granulated air coated his throat, he skipped on to the platform and took the steps two at a time, filling his lungs with fresh oxygen, as he sought the

  surface

  where there was chaos at the Royal Free. The doctors and nurses went diligently about their duties, flitting like soiled butterflies through a quadrangle of calm where the debris had been shovelled into one corner. Bodies needing attention were laid out on mattresses; emergency packs of donated blood bobbed in a bath of dirty cold water. I stopped one of the nurses; she was wearing a bloodied bandage on one hand. She had lost her hat: her pale red hair, though pinned back, was coming loose, like errant strands of sugar on a candyfloss pile. The map of her face was spoiled by contour lines of stress and exhaustion.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘But I have a friend here. He’s a patient. Greg Noon. I need to know if he’s all right.’

  ‘Which ward was he on?’ the nurse asked, looking back at the shattered building. One half of it was dust. I got the message.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll find him.’ I pushed past her and negotiated a path through the rubble, overturning ruined beds and cupboards when they blocked my way, halting and listening for voices despite the pleas by the nurse that I return. Occasionally, as I rose on the surface of the mound, a piece would give way, causing me to slip. It was treacherous going, but I wasn’t really going anywhere.

  ‘Oi, idiot!’ came a harsh voice. A doctor in a grimy white overcoat came flapping up at me over the bricks, a stethoscope swishing about her neck. A paper mask concealed the lower part of her face, but her eyes were wild blue, pumped with adrenaline and concentration. ‘D’you think we haven’t enough casualties around here without you trying to get your legs broken?’

  I stood my ground and shrugged. She caught up with me. She smelled heavily of soap and soil. A plug of something viscous, blood-streaked, clung to her coat pocket, from which a half-eaten Topic bar protruded.

  ‘I’m worried about my friend,’ I said, kicking at the bricks and sending a plume of dust over the doctor’s shoes.

  ‘There’s nobody here, clearly,’ she said. ‘If he was in that wing…’ she pointed at the powder that remained of the hospital, ‘…then he’s dead, I’m afraid. There was a big explosion. A fire. Nobody could have survived. He’ll have been moved elsewhere.’

  Elsewhere turned out to be the morgue. The doctor – Dr Massey – explained that much of it had collapsed, precipitating the need to lay out the bodies on the stairs. Ahead, in the grainy half-light, I could make out pale wooden joists where they had been wedged up against what remained of the morgue ceiling.

  ‘We begin here,’ Dr Massey said. ‘Or rather, you do. I have to get back. I have to suture a wound this big with a needle this small. Jesus.’

  I called after her. ‘You have no idea where he is in here?’

  ‘All the filing, the records, they’re shagged.’

  ‘What about ethics?’ I shouted, my voice breaking as I tried to argue my way out of the task. ‘You’re happy to let me wander around here on my own?’

  She was ascending into the light, her back to me. ‘They’re shagged too. Just don’t eat anything, or fuck anything and I won’t mind what you get up to. Everything’s shagged. Earthquakes do that.’ She stopped and turned around. ‘Look, nobody’s forcing you to do this. If you’ve got the heebie-jeebies, forget it. Eventually, when we’ve sorted ourselves out here, you’ll discover what happened to your friend.’

  But I had to go on. With every shroud I turned back, I half-expected to see Laura’s face staring back at me, the blood at her mouth like strange lipstick. But all I saw were ranks of calm, fixed bodies, as though carved from wax or soapstone. Death had made relatives of them all, a breed of silent, serene creatures. I could almost sense a kinship with them, as though in the ruin that patterned their bodies, there was something meant for me, a clue that only I could solve. I closed one eye and the imbalance within myself deepened – the uncertainty of who I was – until I felt on the verge of being bisected.

  And then a crumbling of soil behind me. I turned to see a child looking at me through the wall. She was blinking like some large, mutated mole.

  ‘Monck,’ she sang.

  I opened my mouth to answer, though I wondered what she meant.

  ‘Coin,’ I said, in spite of myself.

  ‘There’s movement,’ she said. She looked thoughtful for a second, then grinned. ‘Strange things are afoot.’

  ‘Someone close to me has been kidnapped,’ I told her. ‘Someone I… loved. She might be hurt. She might be dead. I need to know where Blore is.’

  ‘The dead zones,’ she gurgled through a sudden torrent of phlegm. She spat a black wad of it against one of the shrouds. The sputum slid slowly down it like a man shot. ‘You know that. There’s one at Belsize Park. Let’s both go.’

  ‘It’s no work for a child,’ I said, wondering how I knew her, how I knew that I needed to find a man called Blore, how this all didn’t seem quite as weird as it ought to.

  Coin shook her head and smiled. ‘You know where to look. At least, you would if you came down here. Where it’s warm. Where it’s safe. Where you ought to learn to belong. Stop fogging your mind with all this Top shite.’ She wriggled backwards and was gone.

  I went after her, grabbing hold of her leg when it seemed she was getting away. She laughed and then squealed, sank her teeth into my hand.

  ‘Hey,’ I shouted. ‘Cut that out. You and me are going to have a talk.’

  She jutted her chin out at me and raised her fists. ‘Talk to this,’ she said, and swung for me. I felt the air move in front of my face. Up close, in decent light, I saw how she wasn’t as young as I had initially believed. She was bird-like, her figure boyish. Her dirty blonde hair fell about her shoulders in clumps and tangles. She was maybe thirteen or fourteen. The expressions on her face wouldn’t sit still, they shivered between a taunting impishness, to petulance, to flat-out anger.

  ‘I need help,’ I said.

  ‘That should make the news headlines,’ she said, a sly smile flirting with her lips. ‘I don’t think.’

  I gripped her arm again and pulled her closer. ‘Stop fucking around,’ I said. ‘That note you gave me almost got me killed. Who put you up to it?’

  Confusion pulled her face apart. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened. She said, ‘He said he wanted to help you. He’s helped you before. He saved your life. He wouldn’t – ’

  I shook her hard. ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Fucking who? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Down here, we know him as Griste. You’ll know him as – ’

  ‘Greg,’ I said. ‘Greg.’ All the fury went out of me. I had to sit down. ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘He gave me the note. He told me to give it to you. He said he thought it would lead to you having a purpose. He wanted you to be a part of things. He said releasing you from the Face was the worst thing he had ever done. He
was trying to make things right for you.’

  ‘I nearly died,’ I said.

  ‘He couldn’t have known that. He thought he was saving you. Saving you again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked her. ‘Why do you keep saying that? The closest he ever came to saving me was getting me my first job in London. I met him by chance. He was kicked out of a pub. We got talking…’

  As I was saying the words, I could see how that first meeting might have been contrived. ‘But he feels as though he has nothing,’ I continued. ‘You should see him. He tried to kill himself.’

  ‘Sometimes the people with the best skills become numb to what it is they’re doing,’ she said. ‘It becomes so second nature, it’s like drinking water. Like breathing. They suddenly see beyond that. It can be a shock.’

  ‘I bet it can.’

  ‘He was your guardian,’ Coin said. ‘He taught you the art of Inbetweening. You would have been missing for ever if it wasn’t for him.’

  ‘Missing? Who’s missing?’

  ‘You were. Once.’ She came and sat by me, tucking her hands under her thighs, unselfconsciously topless. There were faint tribal markings coiled around the burgeoning curves of her body, like those on the woman that had come to kill me and not, as Greg had ostensibly believed, come to take me into the fold.

  ‘What do you remember of your first days in London?’

  I opened my mouth. And then closed it. I said: ‘I remember getting on a train, arriving, getting off the train…’

  ‘You were picked up by sentinels in Monck Street. They noticed that you had banged your head. You were walking around in a daze, up and down the same patch of road. You had a bag with you. You looked lost.’