London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I know what it’s like.’

  ‘I haven’t been underground for weeks. Months, even. It was fucking up my head. I’ve been running for days. I can’t get a grip.’

  He looked much thinner than the cocky chancer selling copies of the Top Story by my flower stall. He looked hunted. But didn’t we all? Panic came off him in lazy great waves.

  ‘There’s a way back,’ I said, not believing I had said it. I hadn’t considered the option myself. Not much. ‘If you want it, there’s a way back.’

  He inched towards me, licking his lips, his eyes ranging madly around the empty square. Our voices caromed off the shattered façades. On the wall behind him, in white chalk, that infuriating logo again. Like a bottle, lying on its side. ‘What?’ he said. ‘How?’

  ‘They’ve found a new home. You… we can be a part of it, if we want it. I think I know the way, but I don’t know if they’ll keep the access open much longer. Maybe they’ve sealed it already.’

  ‘I need it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here for me. What’s the point of selling a magazine to help the homeless if the people buying it are homeless too?’ He laughed an ugly little desperate laugh and licked his lips again. ‘I want it. How do I get in?’

  Bottles stacked up in my thoughts. Bottles everywhere. All my narcoleptic episodes had been infected with the teasing shape. They were more real than the friends, the imagined friends, that had held them. I gave him an address and I told him to meet me there in the evening, eight o’clock. I was relieved. I was grateful too for Lucas forcing my hand. Although I hadn’t really needed my arm twisting too much. It seemed right. It felt spot on.

  ‘Lucas,’ I said, as he was turning to go.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Blore. Have you seen him?’

  A beat.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for fucking ages.’

  I watched Lucas twitchily leg it towards Piccadilly. I didn’t know what he was going to do for the next few hours until we met up again, but I didn’t care either. I needed this time alone. I had things to do.

  ‘Blore is dead,’ I said to myself. ‘He’s toast.’

  Lucas, ducking right, disappeared around the corner. I thought I saw his shadow but the sky was too overcast to create any.

  Bottles. A bottle, on its side.

  I took out my mobile and tried Yoyo’s number but there was no reply. I dialled Meddie, but before I punched in the last digit, the battery died. I walked, knowing how far it was, but needing to find someone I cared for in all the chaos. A face I knew would be just the tonic I needed. One foot after the other, counting them off, all the steps north. Just shy of Fortess Road the land levelled off and normality seemed within grasp, if you ignored the silence, the absence of traffic, if you didn’t look over your shoulder. I found an abandoned bicycle and pedalled to Meddie’s place; all the way there I didn’t see another soul.

  The door to their flat was open when I arrived. I dumped the bike and stood in the hallway. I could smell fried onions. The sound of water tumbling into a full bath came from deeper within the flat. Half a dozen of Yoyo’s novels were scattered on the stairs leading to the upstairs flats. I picked one up. It was called The Blue Tiger. I leafed through the pages; all of them were blank. Okay, I thought. Okay, it’s a notebook, that’s all. I saw one that she had been reading recently, The Vanishing Road. Empty. They were all blank.

  I threw them on the floor, angry that Yoyo had duped me with such a cheap little trick, although she hadn’t really gone out of her way to deceive me, and it wasn’t hurting anybody. Still, I felt misled; I thought Yoyo trusted me.

  ‘Hello?’ I called, a little snappily. I heard footsteps all around me, but none of them were approaching. I headed for Meddie’s bedroom, but she wasn’t there. I thought I heard movement in Iain’s room, but when I put my head around the door, it was empty.

  I padded to the kitchen with my head tickling with something that seemed urgent. It was like half-seeing the picture that emerges from the stereogram, only to lose it before being able to recognise what it is. Half-finished mugs of tea sat on the table, along with the remains of minute-steak sandwiches. Iain’s chemistry set was out. He liked to make toast with his paraffin-fuelled Bunsen burner and drink his vodka from test tubes. Peanuts were arranged in an agar dish. A pipette contained salad dressing.

  From the hallway, I heard Meddie call out: ‘Oh hi, Ads.’

  Exasperated, I hurried back to the front door but there was nobody there. Just the sense of a space recently vacated.

  ‘We’re going to watch a film,’ Yoyo said, and I turned to see the wedge of a shoe slip from view over the last riser on the stairwell. I raced up after her and stood on the landing staring up at the unoccupied stretch to the first floor.

  ‘Yoyo? Meddie?’

  ‘Down here,’ Iain called.

  I retraced my steps, trying to keep my shaky legs from spilling me. Back in the living room, the blinds had been drawn and Iain’s projector was neatly set up on the table, the soft white gloves he used to handle the machinery and the reels folded neatly next to it. Whenever he wore them, he looked as if he should be creeping around a snooker table. Light was coming from a candle on the table in the kitchen. The dishes had been cleared away. I exhaled very slowly and went searching for a drink. In the fridge was a bottle of Stella Artois. I cracked it open and took a long, long swig.

  I sat down on the sofa and waited for them to join me. Hoping that they would join me. Someone blew out the candle. The projector stuttered into life. Someone sat down next to me; I felt myself tip incrementally as the sofa’s cushions were realigned.

  From somewhere to my left I heard the legs of a wooden chair scrape against the floorboards. I smelled Meddie’s perfume, maddening as ever, but this time for different reasons. None of the shapes in the dark would resolved themselves into anything I could identify. I inched my hand to my right, expecting to feel Yoyo’s duffel coat, but there was nobody sitting next to me. My heart leapt. It suddenly sounded very loud, so loud that I almost didn’t hear what Iain had begun to say to me.

  ‘All my life needed was a sense of some place to go,’ he quoted. ‘I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people.’

  ‘You talking to me?’ I asked, and tried to force some laughter. The white space on the wall suddenly jumped with colours and shapes. Me in the cellar of The Pit Stop, my trousers around my ankles, fucking an empty space. I felt the area inside my head bend and thought, I’m gone, I’m out of it, but then the light roared back into the room and I was recovering from a narcoleptic attack. Nobody else but me in the room. No sound except the flap-flap-flap of film at the end of the reel.

  Before I left, I went back for one more look in Iain’s room. What I thought was Iain’s room. Whoever the fuck’s room it was. I studied the film posters. Dozens of them. Alien, The Deer Hunter, Chinatown, Heat, Barry Lyndon, Don’t Look Now. And there I stalled. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland peering out from a photograph frame that was seeping blood on to a table. Above them, the tag line: Pass the Warning.

  ‘Yoyo,’ I said. I dropped the bottle from my hand. It smashed. And I remembered.

  A hot, panicky journey on the Underground many years ago with Mum and Dad, on a visit to London, a hasty, stress-inducing day trip. I remember Dad pointing out the shape of the Circle Line on the Tube map, trying to distract me from the crowds, my nausea. ‘Look Adam,’ he had said, ‘it’s not really a circle, it’s bottle-shaped. We’re riding a bottle.’ I’d laughed a lot when he said that, the pattern of the line rising out of the tangle of coloured lines like something always known, rather than indicated moments before.

  That logo I was seeing everywhere. It wasn’t a logo after all. It was a map.

  I found an A-Z eventually, a whole host of them, sticking out of the dirt at a petrol station. On the back, where the Tube map was printed, I traced a line with my finger, di
ametrically, from one corner of the base of the Circle Line’s ‘bottle’ to the mouth. And again from the other side. Both lines intersected at St Paul’s. Bang on the money. I set off on the bike immediately, clasping the Fireglow plant to my chest like a beloved toy.

  Who was the cartographer? Who had been scratching and painting and chalking these clues to Blore’s whereabouts around the city? Had it been Greg, who had tried to help by giving me the note that originally led me to Blore’s doorstep? Was it Iain, Meddie and Yoyo – myself, ultimately – trying to nudge me towards understanding by projecting myself into imagined friends in my narcoleptic blackouts?

  Was it H.? Did he want to be stopped?

  It stands in the tunnel, Its arms outstretched. The tunnel is too wide for It to be able to touch the sides, but It can as good as feel the damp bricks, their rough texture under Its fingers, as well known to It as Its own skin. There is no graffiti down here. Nobody ever sees the walls, or it might just be that they are too moist to take the spray paint. Litter is wadded into the angles between wall and floor: a maroon crate, a blue Calor gas bottle, skins and wrappers, newspapers and cardboard tubes. A sock. A torn shirt. The arch above Its head is studded with cable routers, dark shadows show where the cables once ran: all are naked now. Reinforced lights punch into the dark; perspective draws them closer together: at the end of the tunnel, lilac light spills across the walls like a painting accident. Its light. Its nest. Its focus. Here It can sit and feel London spin out around It and above It. The tunnels take all its weight; by extension, It takes it too, deep into It where it nourishes It, fills Its veins with heat. All the deadweight loads, vibration loads, soil and water pressure, the seismic activity. All the tons of gravel and aggregate and Portland stone, the oxblood tiles, the steel, the wire. Sumps, pumps, storm drains. Electrical distribution systems, switchyards, ventilation ducts, utility tunnels. It is it, and It is it. It is a machine. It is London.

  It enters the broken room, with its switch-boxes, circuit-breakers, cable chases and valves. A mercury arc rectifier sits on a table, its condensing chamber glowing like something from a science fiction novel. It sits and places its hands on the glass. There are many fingerprints on the glass. Some red, some brown. Some still wet.

  ‘I am London.’ It says the words and they sprint away from It down the tunnel, as if afraid of the creature that formed them. ‘I am London.’

  I heard the words. I heard them, but my mind tried its best to persuade me otherwise. It’s the air in the tunnels. It’s the ghosts of trains. It’s the rats, the hiss of the rats. It’s my brain, decaying on its stem. Refusing to open up and show me what was what.

  Paternoster Square expanded around me, a bright, clean, traffic-less area filled with pristine buildings, shops and restaurants. Pedestrians strolled along the piazza, or the landscaped gardens in St Paul’s Cathedral churchyard. The lights were coming on as the sun set. Everything was scarlet and blue for a short time. Everyone was smiling, as if they were extras in an advert for toilet roll.

  I was exhausted. My legs ached from so much exercise, and my back was filmed with sweat. The handlebars had re-inflamed my healing fingers.

  I had to lean over and touch the ground, to check it was real. It shouldn’t be like this. It hadn’t been like this, the last time I was here. The place had been a shit heap. It was always a shit heap. The woman had come at me out of a wreck of condemned buildings. But no, the ground was solid enough. Maybe this was part of what recovery meant for me. Maybe I was doing my brain a disservice. Here was truth, at last. Hadn’t I realised something was remiss on my last visit, when the boarded-up shops and office buildings contained no glass to trap my reflection, to show me the falseness of my surroundings? It must have been a narcoleptic landscape, something that had seeped through from my past, perhaps projected by the fear of my proximity to Blore’s lair, a background for Yoyo, Meddie and Iain to play against. I was mapping my way out of the past, adding colour to the uncharted white spaces in my head.

  This place had been twenty years waiting for the wrecking ball, marooned by recession and its own poverty. My head or Paternoster Square? Take your pick.

  I scooted into St Paul’s Tube and fought a path down to a platform partly blocked by the ceiling, which had collapsed on to the tracks. Water was spraying from a ruptured pipe. I dropped down between the rails and closed my eyes.

  It didn’t take long to find him. I imagined I could hear the vast echoes in the Cathedral permeating down through the soil, and hanging in the clammy air like nets of dust. Footsteps on the tiles, on the hundreds of steps up to the dome; European and Asiatic languages piling into each other on guided tours; coins being dropped into a charity box. I was so attuned that I thought I could hear the lovers in the Whispering Gallery, murmuring their seductions and betrothals. I thought I could hear the pigeons landing on the balustrade around the drum. Through it all, I heard him.

  I am London. I am London.

  I trudged towards his voice, knowing that he was waiting for me, that all this scorpion dancing had been leading up to a moment when our claws were about to close, our stingers ready to be deployed. I no longer feared him. What was at stake had nothing to do with Beneothan, or Nuala, or Laura. It was me and him. It was my past and my future. It was happiness or gloom. Everything had been simplified by the earthquake. It was life or death.

  A tremor ran through the tunnel and I pressed myself to one side, thinking a train must be arriving. But there were no trains. There might never be another train. Not down here. Aftershock, then? Fragments of earth unpacked themselves from the ceiling and rained around me. Tiles smashed in the station behind me. The shuddering levelled off. I heard the depths sigh and groan as they realigned themselves against each other. I went on.

  A tunnel threaded away to my left. Lilac light spat across the point where it curved out of sight. I followed it and found myself in a room that had been some sort of electrical centre of operations. Weird-looking apparatus lay around – circuits and valves and coils – like something from a James Whale film set. And there were photographs on the wall. Pictures of hard-faced men in overalls, their eyes shock-large, very white, but only because their faces were heavily ingrained with grime. They stood together scowling at the camera, carrying that strained expression of people being photographed many, many years ago. One man in particular stood out, but only because of the bloody thumbprints that were smeared across his body, or arranged like a terrible halo around his head. His face was left untouched. That part of his image, in terms of the print at least, was spotless.

  Around me lay the bodies of eviscerated mice and rats. A bucket of human excrement was tucked under the table. The sour smell of urine raged from the walls. I opened the cupboards and found only more switches and levers, warning lights and embossed plastic labels.

  I was thinking of leaving – the smell was forcing me to leave – and wondering whether I had imagined his voice after all, when a shadow of a figure trembled across the far end of the tunnel, growing impossibly large. It seemed he might never appear within it, that the shadow would continue to spread until all of the available light was snuffed out. The knife in my pocket suddenly felt very warm, as if it recognised the flesh it was meant for.

  ‘The cathedral above us took forty years to build,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Not a long time, really, as cathedral-building goes, and this fucker’s a biggie. But still, a lifetime for some, living in the Sixteen Hundreds.’

  There was nowhere for me to go. I was trapped. I looked around me for some sign of egress: a grille in the ceiling, a baffle leading to a ventilation shaft, a hidden door, but nothing. This was the end of the line.

  ‘Imagine a life devoted to the cathedral. Your life would be the cathedral. Maybe you’d be working on the great Corinthian columns, or the west towers, or the Dome itself. Maybe you were at the quarry, cutting Portland stone. You’d start out on it as a strapping teenager and before it was over, you’d be pensioned off, ready for the grav
e, if the work didn’t kill you first.’

  ‘Get a job. You become the job,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’ His shadow paused on the wall, as if considering what I had said. ‘But what a job. That’s what I call a job. Sacrifice. Dedication. People die for the cathedrals, for the bridges. For the tunnels.’

  I reached for the handle of the knife. Withdrew it. The sound of the blade whispering against the edge of my pocket empowered me. ‘And yes,’ I said, ‘you pushing people in front of trains has forced people to appreciate the finer points of life, yada-yada-yawnsville. Well, circumstances have meant we’re all doing that now. You’re out of a job.’

  ‘It isn’t just about the routine,’ he spat. ‘The nine to five, the sheep, the kow-towing to suits who don’t give a fuck about you or your contribution, as long as the coffers are being filled. It isn’t just about all that shit.’

  The shadow came on. Measured tread. Something slithered from his grip and jangled by his side, catching and turning in the filth on the floor. Another distant aftershock sifted earth through the cracks in the ceiling; caused the mugs on the table to chatter. He appeared. He had shaved his head. Light glanced off the sweating curve of his scalp and caught in the ruined weave of his face, what had once been his face. Part of it had become infected; his left cheek had swelled to a grotesque size, as if he had tucked a tennis ball between his teeth and his cheek. The colour of him was the puce of the membrane on squid.

  ‘Those photographs,’ I said, beginning to understand. ‘The man in those photographs. Who is he?’

  He stopped again. I couldn’t tell whether I’d angered him with the question. I didn’t care. He switched his weapon to his other hand, then back again. I did the same. Blore chuckled.

  ‘He’s my great-grandfather. Henry Glaber. They knew him as The Mole. He could tunnel like no other. Strong. Staying power. He worked like three men. Four.’

  ‘What happened, Blore?’