by Steve Mosby
The frame looks like this: a bright, pale blue explosion in the bottom left-hand corner; the same in the middle at the top. In between, there’s a mixture of black and grey pixels and if you look at it right they give the rough impression of a street edge, a pavement and the entrance to a black hole of wasteground.
A moment passes.
Then, the camera zooms in, moving between the two stars of the streetlights and arriving at the gap in the chain-link fence in time with the van. All the colour has been drained from it – and most replaced by shadow – but you can tell it’s the same van from scene two. The one they took Amy away in.
Dark figures emerge from both sides, and something clambers out of the guts of the vehicle. The big man again. There’s some brief conversation; a few heads looking this way and that. A shake and a nod, and then something that might be a laugh. One of the men – the same one as before – is smoking; the tip of the cigarette burns a bright, dancing red pixel into the screen. Beyond that, it’s difficult to make out the details. You can only really tell that they’re men at all from the way the spaces between them interact as they move. When they stand still, they vanish.
They unload something from the side of the van.
You can’t tell what it is, but there are two men carrying it between them. One of them backs onto the wasteground, and then they disappear through the gap carrying something which might be a bucket of some kind.
The smoker waits by the van, sitting down in the open side, elbows resting on his knees. He’s smoking thoughtfully. The camera stays on him for a second, and then cuts to—
—a different view of Downtown.
It’s more comprehensive than the last, and the light is better. As a result, the road is clearly visible, and you can see that somebody has painted the words FAIRWAY STR down the middle of it in such enormous white letters that it’s like a signal for rescue helicopters. The buildings are clearly visible as well: we’re on a street corner, and the centre of attention is what looks like a café. There are chairs and tables outside, and even a few people sitting at them. The inside looks bright. The view is too fuzzy to make out any details, but it’s certainly a place of business – although whether that business has anything to do with coffee or doughnuts anymore is difficult to say. A green canopy hanging over the outside seating area tells us exactly what this place used to be, regardless of its current occupation.
Cut back to the original camera.
The van is gone, and the street is empty. It’s lighter than before, though, and a shadow of the chain-link fence is dancing on the ground.
Cut to—
Combo’s Deli.
Despite all my negative expectations, it actually looked like a genuine soup kitchen, or – at the worst – a down at heel café. It was brightly-lit, which made all the windows into pale, yellow squares. It also appeared to be full of various kinds of smoke, and you could smell each of them from across the road: tobacco mingling with cannabis, mingling with something else, mingling with burning grease and frying food. I could hear the sizzle and scrape of metal spatulas chiselling burnt matter from the base of metal woks, and the shake of pans as onions and peppers were sent spinning. It made me hungry. I’d spent about six hours of the day in transit with little to show for it, and my stomach was clearly beginning to wonder why exactly it had kept up with me. I promised so much and delivered so little. With my stomach as with everything else in my life.
There were a few people hanging around in the Deli and a few more outside. One guy in tight blue jeans was trying to show his tightly-packed balls to the world, sitting spread-legged and lounging, sucking on a bottled beer. At the same table, another man was smoking a joint and considering the empties. That pair formed the centrepiece. On other tables around them: a gaggle of whores, deep in enthusiastic conversation; an old man, trying to form a loop of warmth with his coffee cup; an even older lady wrapped up in a tartan shawl, staring into space; a chef on his break, playing games with his lighter – the flame going on and off, hanging in the air in front of him.
None of them seemed to give much of a shit about me.
I looked over my shoulder. Halfway up the building on the opposite corner to the Deli, there was a video camera. If I hadn’t known it was there, I’d never have seen it.
The chain-link fence ran along the edge of the pavement to my left.
Beyond it, the wasteground.
The broken-down section was a little further ahead, almost directly opposite the Deli. I walked up to it. When I got there, I stopped in my tracks. The butt-end of a cigarette was resting in the gutter, looking faded and folded and old. My mind flicked back to the man in the video clip, and I stared at the butt for a few seconds, my heart beating hard and fast.
And then I looked through the break in the fence to my left.
There wasn’t much actual ground visible in the waste-ground. It was probably thirty metres wide, twenty deep, with a few other sections leading off from the main one, cornering around and between the surrounding buildings, as black as bad teeth. The floor was swollen with angles of discarded metal and rusted debris. Once upon a time this had been a park, perhaps: a nice place to come and sit. And then, when Uptown was being built, it became a place to toss superfluous machinery and unused bolts, struts and sections of frame. And then everything else. Mouldering suitcases. Old clothes. Furniture. Stuff that nobody wanted.
Stuff that nobody wanted anymore.
I looked up. A few spotlights on the buildings had gone in-growing, spreading light up at the roof and casting shadows downwards. A torrent of dirty rain was falling from the ruins above, spattering over the wasteground, and the air was full of the stink of corrosion and dying iron. Where the water spilled past the spots it turned into flashes that looked like laser fire.
I went in.
The air seemed to be darker through the fence, and the pattering of the rain sounded louder. It was like somebody pissing on wet soil – a moist, clicky noise. Over on the left-hand side, somebody had left a dead dog in a white bag beneath a strong flow. I grimaced, and then turned away when I realised it wasn’t in a bag at all. The steady cascade was nudging off its slack skin.
I moved deeper, edging between metal sculptures. It was difficult to make out much detail. Everything was just pieces of shadow or obscure shapes piled on top of even more underneath. Everything smelled of decay. There was rotting laundry, here, and food, and the air was itchy with spores of rust. There was a warm breeze tugging through from between the buildings, and a dangerous snake-like hum of electricity was coming from one corner.
Far above me, something groaned, and then the ground shuddered a little. Everything rattled for a second.
A tram, passing overhead in Uptown.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, but in the end I found a smell and followed it, like it was a black ribbon hanging in the air. It was tenuous at best, but it led me to the back of the wasteground, to a narrow space between two of the surrounding buildings. The smell was strongest here, filling the air and giving it a sharp little twist, but there wasn’t much light to see by. I could make out a tent of black, charred iron resting loosely over a slight dip in the muddy ground, but hardly anything else. I looked to one side. More mud. More rubbish.
Water dripping down from above. One drop at a time.
Not mud.
Another drop.
Not rubbish at all.
Another drop of water.
Without knowing how I’d got there, I was on my knees, pulling fistfuls of black muck away from the ground. The mud that wasn’t mud made my hands go as black as the night.
Everything seemed suddenly concentrated, including time. I was smelling what was in my hands, and breathing in the long-cold memory of ash and fire, but I didn’t remember moving my hands to my face. And I was sobbing, too, but I didn’t even remember starting to cry. My head was filled with the smell of a hundred thousand pages burning down to black nothing, while a fire cast flickering shadow
s of a chain-link fence onto the pavement beyond. I could hear the crackling and popping as ink ignited, and see the curling tension in the spine as the book was engulfed.
Another drop of water. The rain was spattering down onto my face.
In my mind’s eye, I could see black bin-liners soaked in petrol and set alight, and, without thinking, I reached over and scattered the rubbish piled up on my right. Most of it was scorched and ruined: disjointed plateaus of sodden ash. But there were a few scraps, here and there.
Cloth.
Something harder, too: the pared-down bone of a blackened knife. Its handle was burnt away.
I heard the tapping sound again, drifting in from somewhere between the Deli and where I was kneeling, shins growing cold from the mud soaking into my trousers. I turned around. Walter Hughes and his bodyguard were silhouetted at the entrance to the wasteground. Just standing there quietly, watching me. Behind them, in the middle of the street, I could see Kareem.
I turned back to where Amy’s remains were lying. You couldn’t call it lying anymore, of course: if she was anything, she was lost at sea. My face had clenched up into this strange thing; it felt unreal. I was sobbing, and I realised I couldn’t even keep myself upright properly. I allowed the slide to happen, collapsing into the mud and rocking slowly onto my left-hand side. Feeling the cold seep into my body, but at the same time not really feeling it at all.
I reached out to gather up a loose armful of burnt rubbish, and I held it as close to me as it would come.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
You often hear about this idea of hitting rock bottom – of being as low as you can possibly go – and you imagine that, if you ended up there, then that’s about it for you. It really is The End. It’s like you disappear out of existence when you land on rock bottom. The floor’s made out of a trillion snapping scissors that shred you into blood and shit in half a second. You’re so far down that you don’t even need to pull a trigger or take a pill. Sheer depression and social abstraction will blink you out of existence.
But of course it doesn’t work like that.
Nothing shreds or pulps you. Your heart feels as broken as it ever could, like a physical injury inside you that you can’t possibly bear, but you don’t die from a broken heart, and everything is bearable. It’s impossible but true: the pain goes on, but it doesn’t kill you. Your whole body feels like this fatal wound, but you’re still aware of it: it’s curled up on the floor, collecting a numb handful of indifferent sensations, and no amount of concentration or desire can rob you of it. This is where you are. Not dead. Not even dying. You’re just waiting to get up, and – sooner or later – you’re going to have to.
It’s just difficult.
Some emotions feel so enormous that by rights you should be able to fall into them forever; they should be able to close up around you until there’s nothing left for people to see. But they’re never as deep as you expect. Ultimately, you still need to pull yourself off the ground and do something, however ‘just difficult’ it might seem. Even the most desperate of suicides still needs to jump.
And so, after a while, I got up. I’d stopped crying by then, but the water was still splattering down from above and I wandered underneath it, soaking my face to the bone and my body to the skin. It was ice cold, but I didn’t care; I needed to wash her away from me. Never had anything felt quite so important. The noise the water made on me was softer than on the ground, and I tested out shifts in tone as it pattered on my head, shoulders and then, ever so quietly, on my outstretched hands. I moved away, and the harsher sound returned: a silenced, spluttering machine pistol.
Shivering, I wiped my wet forearm over my wet face.
Amy was dead.
I’d known all along, and I realised now that all I’d done was twisted the grief into a new shape and channelled it into something emptily constructive. How could she not have been dead? Even before I found Kareem, I must have known: four months without a word.
And now I’d found her.
The routes that had brought us both here were too complicated to catch a grip on. All I knew was that I felt responsible for their architecture: for not taking so many of the turnoffs that would have delivered us somewhere better.
Amy.
You deserved somebody better than me.
I’d told her that before, and she’d said the same thing back. And we’d both always said the same thing in reply: But I love you.
Well at least now we knew who was right.
I started to cry again, looking down at the remains. They were as unrecognisable as a tree growing from a grave would have been, and at that moment I couldn’t imagine doing another thing with my life. That feeling of rock bottom again, and then it passed. I wasn’t going to dissolve, or cease to exist. At least, not without some help.
I touched the lump of the gun, hanging in my pocket.
There’s no God. No Heaven. Nothing after death. I didn’t believe in any of that stuff. But nothing seemed like it might feel better than this. Right then, it felt like I could go for nothing.
Nothing felt about right.
But not this second, I thought. I had money in my pocket, and my stomach was achingly empty. I was soaking. For some stupid, undefined reason, it didn’t feel right to die on wasteground, even though Amy was here with me. It felt like I needed to take control and do it right: make some kind of insignificant ceremony out of it.
So I said goodbye to Amy, and then I touched the gun again, turned around and headed back to Fairway Street.
I got something to eat in Combo’s Deli, hesitating for maybe a second before crossing the street and heading inside. But nobody looked at me twice; even the guy showing off his balls seemed to be staring at something in the middle-distance that was more interesting than me. It felt okay – not threatening in the slightest – and I realised why even as I wandered inside: I belonged here. I was downtown, swept under the carpet. Jettisoned from society, unwanted and aimless and uncaring, just like everyone else here. And we can smell our own.
When I was younger, I used to imagine what it would feel like to know you were going to die. I figured it would be both scary and liberating. Scary because I didn’t want to die, but liberating because you could do anything you wanted. I thought that being about to die would make you aware of how much society ties you down. You’d never have to look someone in the eye again if you didn’t want to. Never have to answer to the law for what you did. Not have to worry about the hangover or the injuries, or what anyone might think of you. Never say please or thank you.
But old habits died harder than I would.
‘Coming right up,’ the owner told me, after I’d asked him for a cup of coffee, and a plate of sausages, bacon and chips, and then said please to round it all off. He turned away to his sizzling grill, warning me: ‘You wait here, boy. There ain’t no table service.’
He slopped it up. I paid him (I said thank you, too) and took my food to a far corner of the café. It was delicious: as revoltingly greasy as anything I’d ever tasted, and as good a final meal as anyone could have hoped for. As I ate, I watched the outside world of Downtown through the misty window. You could even see the entrance to the wasteground from where I was sitting. Fuck it, though. I dabbed my mouth with a paper towel and took the tray back over to the counter.
‘You rent out rooms, here?’ I asked.
The owner took the tray off me, looking bored.
‘We rent out rooms,’ he said, ‘yeah. Thirty a night, breakfast is extra. Are you on your own?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You want to be?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I just want a room.’
‘Money’s in advance. How long’re you here for?’
‘Just one night.’
‘Just one night. Here you go.’
He slipped a set of keys off a hook behind the grill. I pulled out thirty pounds, and we traded.
‘Stairs over there,’ he said, gesturing to the far corner. ‘You
change your mind about the company, I can sort you out with something. With anything.’
‘I won’t.’
‘If you’re not gone by ten tomorrow, we come looking for you.’
Well, that would be nice for everyone.
‘I understand,’ I said, and went to find my room.
The room at Combo’s was as awful as you’d imagine. There was a bed, a table and a chair, and that was about it. The shared bathroom was down the hall. There was a bare bulb hanging down in the far corner, beside the black square of a window, but the light was sickly and weak, and it gave the room an appearance of wasting illness. It was like the room’s liver had failed.
Worse than that, though, were the walls. They had been painted a pale and anaemic green, but there were brown patches on three of them, varying in size and height. The colour had faded, presumably through scrubbing, but it was still recognisable for what it was: blood. It looked like somebody had been butchered in here. There was a spattering of it above the headboard of the bed, and I bet that if I’d have pulled off the white cotton sheet from the mattress I’d have found a stain there, as well. But I didn’t think I was going to do that.
I put the gun on the bed beside the damp pile of papers I’d collected. Then, I went over to the window and closed a pair of thin beige curtains against the Downtown night. If you’re keeping count, there were flecks of blood on the curtains, too.
Honestly, I didn’t know how I was going to do this. I was shaking. To calm myself down, I lay on the hard bed, hands crossed behind my head to form a rough pillow, and closed my eyes.